christian – Page 19 – Many Things Considered

American Presidents, Books, Football, Obama, Organized Labor, Political Correctness

What’s In a Name

Posted on October 10, 2013by christian

Now for something completely different…

While the nation dangles one foot over the fiscal cliff and while most of the federal government remains shut down, the epicenter of American politics has yet another crisis to confront – the name of its football team.

I knew the controversy swirling around the National Football League Redskins had reached crisis proportions when Lanny Davis, the slightly oily adviser to those in trouble, started issuing statements on behalf of the mostly tone deaf Redskins’ owner. Davis, you may remember, advised Bill Clinton in the Monica days and more recently helped out a charming fellow named Laurent Gbagbo who, before he was forced from power to face charges of torturing his political enemies, was quaintly described as the Ivory Coast’s strongman. Davis told the New York Times in 2010 “controversy is what I do for a living.” Welcome to the Redskins’ beat.

Davis was engaged – controversy is what he does after all – after President Obama weighed in on whether the Washington, D.C. team should change its name. “I don’t know whether our attachment to a particular name should override the real legitimate concerns that people have about these things,” Obama told The Associated Press.

“These things,” of course, would be names and mascots for sports teams that at least some Native Americans (and others) find offensive. Now you might think with all that the president has on his plate from Syria to Ted Cruz, from a debt ceiling to tanking approval numbers that he would have deftly sidestepped the question of the Redskins’ name. But to his credit, even while giving half the country another reason to dislike him, Mr. Obama answered the question and a million dinner table conversations were launched.

Maureen Dowd began her column on the controversy with this: “Whenever I want to be called a detestable, insidious proselytizer of political correctness, I just bring up the idea of changing the name of the Redskins at a family dinner. What if our football team’s name weren’t a slur, I ask brightly. Wouldn’t that be nice?’

Redskins’ owner Daniel Snyder once said he would “never” change the name, but in post-Lanny Davis mode he struck a quieter, if no less certain, tone. “I’ve listened carefully to the commentary and perspectives on all sides, and I respect the feelings of those who are offended by the team name,” Snyder wrote to the Washington Post. “But I hope such individuals also try to respect what the name means, not only for all of us in the extended Washington Redskins family, but among Native Americans too.”

“This word is an insult. It’s mean, it’s rude, it’s impolite,” Kevin Gover, who is Native American and directs the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. “We’ve noticed that other racial insults are out of bounds. . . . We wonder why it is that the word that is directed at us, that refers to us, is not similarly off-limits.”

Here’s my guess: sooner of later, given a hard push by the ever image conscious NFL leadership and with what will surely be mounting pressure from political and business folks, the Redskins will take a new name. Gover, the Native American head of the Smithsonian museum, suggested a novel name – the Washington Americans. That may catch on and actually could be a tribute to the real Americans. But in the meantime Lanny Davis and others are left to defend the Redskins by pointing out that it’s not just the D.C. football team that has a potentially offensive name. There are the Atlanta Braves, the Cleveland Indians, the Chicago Blackhawks, the Kansas City Chiefs and the Edmonton Eskimos. Not to mention the Utah Utes, the Florida State Seminoles and the Orofino Maniacs.

Orofino, Idaho, of course, is home not only to the high school Maniacs, but an Idaho state mental hospital. There is disagreement about which came first, the nickname or the facility, but the monicker has stuck through the years and helped create some memorable headlines. My personal favorite – “Maniacs Run Wild, Kill Kamiah.” Efforts to change the name have be labeled, well, crazy. Don’t mess with my Maniacs or my Redskins. No offense intended, of course.

The University of North Dakota Fighting Sioux are no long either fighting or Sioux. After prolonged controversy the school dropped the “Fighting Sioux” nickname in 2012 and currently has no name. State law actually prohibits the university from renaming its sports teams until 2015. Let me get a jump on that and suggest the North Dakota “Damn Cold Winters.”

While we’re on the subject, I don’t generally like sports teams named after animals. Too many Lions and Tigers, Badgers and Eagles. The best sports names are unique and help tell a story. The Packers, for example, or the 49ers. I like the name, but have never been a fan of the Dodgers. The Minnesota Twins make sense to me. Also the Montreal Canadiens. Not so much the transplanted from New Orleans Utah Jazz. I’m not sure jazz is even legal in Utah.

Mr. Controversy-Is-My-Business Lanny Davis says in defense of the Redskins that the name is 80 years old and, of course, is used with no disrespect. Really. I grew up near the Pine Ridge Sioux reservation in South Dakota and no white guy, at least one in his right mind, would call a member of the tribe what the Washington teams calls itself. The Confederate battle flag has been around for more than 150 years, but it is now widely recognized as a symbol of white supremacy. The Ole Miss Rebels banned the stars and bars from football games for just that reason. Atlanta was once home to the minor league baseball “Crackers,” but that slang put down of poor whites wouldn’t fly today.

“Come to our reservation,” says Ray Halbritter, head of the Oneida Tribe that is leading the effort to change the D.C. team name, and “get up before everybody, families with children, and start out by saying how many cute little redskin children you see in the audience. Then try and tell us that you’re honoring us with that name.” No one has taken Halbritter up on the offer according to Joe Flood who has written at Buzzfeed about Native American reaction to the name controversy.

Yes, the Redskins will eventually change their name. The only real question is how much turmoil will be created and how long it will take. After all, as Maureen Dowd says, “All you have to do is watch a Western. The term ‘redskin’ is never a compliment.”

2016 Election, Campaign Finance, Poetry, Supreme Court

The End of Spending Limits

Posted on October 9, 2013by christian

Shaun McCutcheon (that’s him in the photo) is a wealthy guy; an electrical contractor from Alabama who is also a conservative political activist. The Supreme Court appears ready to give Shaun what he says he wants – the chance to spend a great deal more of his money on candidates for federal office.

The Court heard arguments yesterday in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, a sort of sequel to the 2010 Citizens United case that I’ve lamented here in months past. If the Court goes the way the questioning seemed to indicate yesterday one more big prop will be kicked out from under the American jumble of campaign finance laws and once again American democracy will most closely resemble a political version of “The Price is Right.”

Right now, ol’ Shaun is prohibited from contributing more than $123,200 to federal candidates and political parties in a two-year cycle. You might think that would be more than enough political spending for most of us and, of course, it is. But guys with lots of money, from the right and the left, like to participate in the political process because, well you know why they like to participate in the political process. If the Court rules his way Mr. McCutcheon will soon get to start writing checks to federal candidates – just buying good government, I know – for millions and millions every year.

As Charles Fried, who served as Solicitor General in the Reagan Administration noted recently in the New York Times, “Ever since the 1976 Supreme Court case Buckley v. Valeo, in which the court upheld limits on individual federal campaign contributions, every Supreme Court decision on this issue has been based on the distinction between money given to candidates — contributions — and money that individuals or organizations use for their own independent campaign-related expenditures.

“The underlying idea is that while the First Amendment prohibits the government from limiting your political speech (and the more you speak, the more you may have to spend), a contribution is money spent to help someone else speak. The government may not limit your own expression (and since Citizens United that applies to corporations and unions, too), but for almost half a century Congress has limited contributions without being challenged by the Supreme Court.”

Until now.

The Court’s efforts to further destroy limits on money in politics, at least after Citizens United, seems inevitable. Once you decide that the sky is the limit for the Koch Brothers or Bob’s Muffler Shop to spend money on independent political efforts then how can you logically – at least in the logic of the Robert’s Court – limit what Shaun McCutcheon can lavish in the way of cash on his Congressman and yours?

Two things above all stand out in this confluence of money, politics and policy. One is the unbridled willingness of the “conservative” Robert’s Court to trample on precedent and long-established law. The Citizens United decision tossed out 100 years of established law – law made by one branch of government and endorsed by a second – and substituted the wisdom of five appointed justices none of whom has ever held elected office. The expected next move will toss all or most of a law on the books for more than 40 years.

David Cole, writing in the New York Review of Books, makes the case that the current session of the Supreme Court may well see a host of established laws, including the candidate funding restrictions, upended by Roberts and his four like-minded colleagues. “In all of these cases,” Cole writes, “the real question is not whether the conservatives will win, but how they will win. (It’s conceivable that the liberal side will prevail in one or more cases, but most court observers think the odds are against it.) Moreover, in most of the cases, Justice [Anthony] Kennedy, usually the swing vote, has already aligned himself with the strongly conservative view, so the outcome is likely to turn on Roberts. If the Chief Justice and his Court proves to be Conservative, the term could end with a radical revision of established precedent in a host of constitutional areas. If the Court is simply conservative, the status quo precedents will remain intact. We’ll know by June 2014.”

So much for the notion of judicial restraint.

The second takeaway relates to the fact that no member of the current Supreme Court has ever been elected to anything. This is important, I think, because the justices – at least the five most consistently conservative justices – completely dismiss the arguments that unregulated money can and will lead to what the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank quaintly calls “legalized corruption.” Election law expert and law professor Richard L. Hasen says it just as bluntly: “The closer the money comes to the hands of members of Congress, the greater the danger of corruption and undue influence of big donors” and he say what the Court appears ready to do “will greatly increase the chances of a corrupt Congress.”

When U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli suggested yesterday that the Court may have gotten it wrong in Citizens when it dismissed “the risks of corruption from independent expenditures” Justice Antonin Scalia simply said, “It is what it is.” Very thoughtful.

What the definition of “is” is can simply be reduced to money purchasing political influence. And the bigger the purchase the bigger the influence. With the expected decision in McCutcheon it is possible that as few as 500 very, very rich Americans can finance all the costs of running for federal office for everyone running. In such a system the small $250 contribution from the retired couple or the small business owner ceases to matter. Why waste your valuable fundraising time connecting with what Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg called “the little people” when you can raise a few hundred thousand with a couple of calls to civic minded guys like Shaun McCutcheon?

“If Scalia got out of his ideological echo chamber,” Dana Milbank writes in the Post, “he would discover that, encouraged by the court, wealthy conservatives donate to groups such as the Club for Growth and Heritage Action, which threaten to fund primary challenges to Republican lawmakers who show any ideological impurity. Because most Republicans are in safe seats (in part because of Supreme Court-sanctioned gerrymandering), the only threat to their reelection is in a primary — and so they have no choice but to obey the conservative billionaires’ wishes. The problem on the left isn’t as acute, but it’s only a matter of time before liberal billionaires execute a similar purge.”

It’s probably just a coincidence, but Politico reports today that the Koch brothers have given $500,000 to one of the shadowy outside groups that has lobbied Republicans to shutdown the government and threatened GOP “moderates” if they don’t hold fast to the defund Obamacare strategy. That kind of money going directly to candidates can’t be far away.

Reflect on this: the laws restricting the power of money and the impact on our politics of the few with “real” money were passed in the wake of serious political money scandals. The Court has already overturned one law passed in the wake of revelations that rich millionaires, like the notorious Montana Sen. William Andrews Clark, had bribed their way into the United States Senate. The law on trial in the Supreme Court this week was passed in the wake of Watergate, a case of political corruption that had at its heart political money. As sure as dawn follows the night political corruption most odorous is marshaling for the next huge scandal.

Former Solicitor General Fried reminds us that “Justice Scalia once wrote in another context, this argument is not a wolf in sheep’s clothing: ‘this wolf comes as a wolf.’ The only reason the Supreme Court would be tempted to let this wolf in is if the Court wants to see the destruction of all limits on an individual’s donations to a political candidate.”

Thanks to the United States Supreme Court more than ever the political money wolf is at democracy’s door.

2014 Election, Congress, Egan, Idaho Politics, Tamarack, Thatcher

The Shutdown

Posted on October 4, 2013by christian

The late Speaker of the House of Representatives Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill loved to remind colleagues that “all politics is local,” and Tip’s truism is just about all you need to know about the true cause of the current stalemate in Washington, D.C. The handful of Republicans in the U.S. House aided, and abetted by a handful in the Senate, who have precipitated the first government shutdown in 19 years are playing almost exclusively to the conservative folks back home who have helped them along the GOP path to power.

The GOP faction that hates government and condemns any accommodation with the other side has little need to worry about how badly their tactics are playing with the vast majority of Americans, even among those coveted independents, because the shutdown caucus doesn’t care because they don’t have to care. As the Associated Press has noted: “Heavily gerrymandered districts make many House Democrats and Republicans virtual shoo-ins for re-election, insulating them from everything but the views in their slice of the country. That means some lawmakers can be greeted as heroes back home even if nationally the budget standoff comes to be viewed with scorn.”

“After every census and reapportionment, the blue districts get bluer and the red districts get redder,” said former Rep. Steve LaTourette, R-Ohio, using the colorful terms for liberal and conservative districts. “It’s against their electoral interests,” he said, for lawmakers from such districts to move toward the center rather than feed “red meat” to their most ideological constituents.

LaTourette, an ally of Speaker John Boehner is correct, but there is also a false equivalence to his argument. The most ideological Republicans, and many of the voters who sent them to Washington, are driven by what conservative writer Rod Dreher calls a desire to tear down rather than a desire, as members of the loyal opposition, to suggest alternatives and develop a genuinely appealing policy agenda. Democrats, say what you will about their programs, aren’t into hostage negotiations and most buy into the party’s broad policy agenda.

“When I think of the Republican Party,” Dreher writes, “I don’t think of principled conservative legislators who are men and women of vision strategy. I think of ideologues who are prepared to wreck things to get their way. They have confused prudence — the queen of virtues, and the cardinal virtue of conservative politics — with weakness.”

Idaho is a case study in the politics of government by GOP primary voters. The state’s First District Congressman Raul Labrador is generally regarded as a leader of the House faction that has essentially taken control of the national Republican Party and forced Speaker Boehner to march in front of the cameras every day and condemn the Affordable Care Act – Obamacare – and generally carry the scalding water of the Tea Party. Labrador, you’ll remember, was one of the insurgents in the House who came within a few votes earlier this year of kicking Boehner from the Speaker’s Office to the back benches.

Idaho’s Second District Congressman Mike Simpson, a serious legislator, Boehner ally and a seasoned politician not generally given over to political stunts, has, like Boehner, had to go mostly along with the insurgents in order to steel himself against what appears to be an increasingly serious primary challenge; a challenge financed by the same folks who have staked the next Congressional election on bringing the country – again – to the edge of a financial cliff all in the interest of holding hostage President Obama’s health care legislation.

But here is the political irony: the stakes of what is unfolding in Washington may be enormously high for national Republicans, for the economy, for the hundreds of thousands of government workers furloughed and for millions of Americans who are just beginning to feel the effects of a government that has ceased to function in any way that is normal, but there is little or no political consequence for Republicans like Labrador who are electorally secure in their ultra-safe districts. The Republicans who might face the wrath of voters next year are those GOP members like Simpson who haven’t slavishly steeped in the Tea Party’s hot broth of disdain, bordering on hatred for Obama and all that he stands for.

All politics is local and if your district is red enough you can take comfort in marching lock step off a cliff with the folks back home who dislike and distrust Obama so much that the Internet is alive with the rumor that somehow, someway the foreign-born, Muslim socialist in the White House will find a way to circumvent the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution and engineer a third term for himself. There is even a website devoted to Obama 2016. The amendment limiting a president to two terms was proposed, by the way, in the wake of Franklin Roosevelt’s four terms as president and was ratified in 1951, but no matter. The fear and loathing on the far right of the GOP is such that no conspiracy is too outrageous for Tea Party adherents not to worry.

As the New York Times notes today, “Republican elders worry that the tactics of [Texas Sen. Ted] Cruz and his allies in the House are reinforcing the party’s image as obstructionist, and benefiting Mr. Obama at a time when his standing with the public is sliding. A New York Times/CBS poll last week found that 49 percent of Americans disapprove of the president’s job performance.

“The story people see now is President Obama sinking like a rock for months, and the only thing holding him up are the Republicans,” lamented Haley Barbour, the former governor of Mississippi who previously led the Republican National Committee. “We have to get to the best resolution we can under the Obama administration, and then focus on some other things.”

Good advice, not likely to be taken.

With the government shutdown and their demands about Obamacare, “Republicans are setting a precedent which, if followed, would make America ungovernable,” notes the Economist in an editorial. “Voters have seen fit to give their party control of one arm of government—the House of Representatives—while handing the Democrats the White House and the Senate. If a party with such a modest electoral mandate threatens to shut down government unless the other side repeals a law it does not like, apparently settled legislation will always be vulnerable to repeal by the minority. Washington will be permanently paralysed and America condemned to chronic uncertainty.

“It gets worse. Later this month the federal government will reach its legal borrowing limit, known as the ‘debt ceiling.’ Unless Congress raises that ceiling, Uncle Sam will soon be unable to pay all his bills. In other words, unless the two parties can work together, America will have to choose which of its obligations not to honour. It could slash spending so deeply that it causes a recession. Or it could default on its debts, which would be even worse, and unimaginably more harmful than a mere government shutdown. No one in Washington is that crazy, surely?”

We’ll see.

Baseball, Catholic Church, Guns, Politics

The Power of Humility

Posted on September 23, 2013by christian

My reaction to the remarkable interview with Pope Francis that dominated the international news cycle last week was hardly unique. The New York Times’ Frank Bruni wrote Sunday about having the same feeling.

“It was the sweetness in his timbre, the meekness of his posture,” Bruni wrote that was truly remarkable. “It was the revelation that a man can wear the loftiest of miters without having his head swell to fit it, and can hold an office to which the term ‘infallible’ is often attached without forgetting his failings. In the interview, Francis called himself naïve, worried that he’d been rash in the past and made clear that the flock harbored as much wisdom as the shepherds. Instead of commanding people to follow him, he invited them to join him. And did so gently, in what felt like a whisper.”

As a general rule Pope’s don’t do interviews or if they do they speak in a certain Vatican code that is as difficult to decipher as a Ben Bernacke news conference. And when a pope speaks it is not typically in a whisper. Yet, the Argentine Jesuit who has been surprising the world since moving to Rome earlier this year sat for three different interview sessions and then gave the transcript the papal seal of approval by looking it over. In all his answers he spoke like a real person on everything from the Church’s fixation with abortion and gay marriage to his own taste in movies and art. Even before the blockbuster interview that appeared around the world in Jesuit journals Francis was shunning popely convention, as well as the royal trappings and red shoes of the Bishop of Rome, by living in a guest house and working the phones.

Remarkable. Also hugely important, not just for his message of inclusion and self-reflection, but for his style. His Holiness has provided a lesson to leaders – or alleged leaders – in our modern culture, whether they be in business, politics or entertainment on how to lead.

If you are an American Catholic who believes the Church has strayed from the Gospel message focused on works of charity and taking care of the poor and disaffected the Pope’s lengthy interview provides a welcome dose of hope. For those inclined to embrace the Church’s unfailing focus on abortion and gay marriage the Pope has no doubt created some heartburn in the pews. Even the doctrinaire Archbishop of New York had to admit that the big-minded Pope had created “a breath of fresh air.”

Reading the remarkable interview one come away with the impression of a man of faith who, like most of us, struggles with that faith. In how he wages that struggle is the essence of leadership in the modern age – humility, candor, humor, an appeal to reason and above all inclusion.

Contrast Pope Francis’ approach with the senseless bickering and daily preening of small-minded leaders in Washington, D.C. Oh but to possess the certainty of a Sen. Ted Cruz, a young man who has been in the Senate for weeks and has seen his head grow daily ever larger as he speaks as the oracle of the ages that he apparently believes himself to be. So full of their convictions and themselves are Cruz and his Tea Party acolytes that they threaten, bluster and filibuster the country to the edge of another fiscal cliff to unfund a law that both houses of Congress passed and the president signed – three and a half years ago.

In the depressing aftermath of another mass murder by guns, this time in the nation’s capitol, the NRA’s mouthpiece rails against the “broken” mental health system, but nowhere hints at even a tiny bit of humbleness that might acknowledge that the gun culture the NRA helped create might – just might – have something to do with the outrageous level of gun violence in America. In this ever-so-sure world there are never shades of grey only moral certainty articulated in a loud voice.

Or consider those members of Congress like Indiana Republican Marlin Stutzman who voted recently to throw several million poor Americans off food stamps in a move that the Congressman casually says “eliminates loopholes, ensures work requirements, and puts us on a fiscally responsible path.” Mr. Stutzman’s appeal to reason doesn’t look so good when you understand that he took away $39 billion in food assistance with one hand, while cashing in on his own $200,000 farm subsidy with the other and he wasn’t alone. A “fiscally responsible path” obviously only leads to the other guys door.

I could go on, but you get the drift. Little wonder Americans have essentially given up on their political leaders handing the Congress a 20% approval rating, which is actually up a couple of points apparently because voters are embracing Congressional reluctance to rush into another war. Imagine that. Still compared to the enormous problems we face – from gun violence to failing schools, from climate change to a middling economy – the swelled heads who might actually try to tackle those problems seem so very small, so very petty and so very lacking in humility.

As Frank Bruni wrote of the Pope, “authority can come from a mix of sincerity and humility as much as from any blazing, blinding conviction, and that stature is a respect you earn, not a pedestal you grab. That’s a useful lesson in this grabby age of ours.”

Pope Francis, the Jesuit scholar who loves Mozart, Puccini and Fellini’s films, knows something most people in modern public life seem unwilling to learn. You lead not by having the best daily soundbite or finding the newest, most novel way to insult your opponent, but by walking in the other person’s shoes, understanding their motivations and fears and by appealing not to the crassness of partisan politics, but to the sweet reason that is the product of facts and candor and trust.

“We must walk united with our differences: there is no other way to become one. This is the way of Jesus” says the pontiff from Buenos Aires. This still new Pope is doing something Washington, D.C. hasn’t done for a long time. He’s making sense.

Guns, Stevens

What Will It Take

Posted on September 18, 2013by christian

Here are two numbers to fix in your mind as the nation once again visits an aspect of American exceptionalism that has become all-too-familiar. The numbers are 8,261 and 29 and I’ll return to them in a moment.

In the 1950’s and 60’s it took a landmark Supreme Court decision – Brown v. Board of Education – the courage and dignity of a black woman who refused to go to the back, the murder of innocents in a Birmingham church, a March on Washington, much death and violence and ultimately the breaking of Senate filibusters to begin to erase a society’s legacy of slavery and inequality.

From the 1820’s until the great Civil War the subject of slavery could barely be touched in our nation’s political process, so national calamity came calling. The south’s domination of American politics from the 1890’s to the 1960’s meant that civil rights legislation, including anti-lynching laws, access to public accommodations and the ballot box were essentially denied to black Americans, but then something changed. The American people, at least enough of them, acting through their elected representatives decided that society needed to change. A black preacher and a president from Texas, one calling us to live out our creed and the other breaking with his own and his region’s history, began to move us, as Hubert Humphrey once said, “out of the shadow of states’ rights and…into the bright sunshine of human rights.”

The change was slow, too slow, and uneven. For decades our Constitution was interpreted to allow discrimination and thereby ignore and avoid our peculiar and exceptional history. Ultimately the Court had to change along with society and politics and change came.

The political process, paralyzed thanks to special interests, fear, tradition and the next election, had to change and finally it did. The little black girls who were murdered and the white woman who was killed represented a change that, to many Americans, seemed impossible, but wasn’t impossible, only hard and necessary. The passage of the landmark civil rights legislation nearly 50 years ago did not, of course, end discrimination or stamp out racism. Ending those evils remains a constant work in progress, but few would say that America is not a different place in 2013, with a black man in the White House, than it was in 1963 when the young black preacher wrote from his Alabama jail expressing “hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.”

A Too Distant Tomorrow

This morning Priscilla Daniels woke in Washington, D.C. under her own dark cloud. Her 46-year-old husband, Arthur, was killed Monday at the Washington Navy Yard in the most recent mass shooting in America. Priscilla Daniels’ 14-year-old son, Arthur A. Daniels, was shot and killed in 2009 – as his father was Monday – in the back while fleeing his murderer.

“The parallels between the deaths of her husband and son are not lost on Priscilla Daniels,” the Washington Post reports. “Aaron Alexis, the shooter in Monday’s rampage, had repeated run-ins with his military superiors and the law and was cited at least eight times for misconduct for various offenses, according to documents and Navy officials.

“The person who shot her son in 2009 — Ransom Perry Jr. of Northeast — had been arrested nine times before, including as recently as January of that year, on a charge of carrying a pistol without a license. He was sentenced to 24 years in prison. Friends say the family was just starting to come to terms with the loss of their youngest child.”

8,261 and 29

Back to those numbers I mentioned earlier: 8,261 is the number of Americans – at least 8,261 and likely more – who have died as a result of gun violence in America since the Newtown school shootings last December 14. That is an average of more than 29 gun-related deaths in the United States every day since the death of the innocents at Sandy Hook Elementary.

I’ll leave you with this, the words of Chief Medical Officer Dr. Janet Orlowski at MedStar Washington Hospital Center where the dead and wounded were taken Monday:

“I may see this every day…but there’s something wrong here, when we have these multiple shootings, these multiple injuries—there’s something wrong. The only thing I can say is, we have to work together to get rid of it. I’d like you to put my trauma center out of business. I really would. I would like to not be an expert on gunshots…We just cannot have one more shooting with so many people killed. We’ve got to figure this out. We’ve got to be able to help each other.

“So I have to say, it’s a challenge to all of us—let’s get rid of this. This is not America. This is not Washington D.C. This is not good.”

You really have to wonder what it will take.

Trump, Typewriters

My Royal

Posted on September 17, 2013by christian

More than 30 years ago, as occasionally happens, I was in the right place at the right time. I invested $20 in a piece of writing history – a 1935 vintage Royal portable typewriter. In the intervening three decades I have schlepped my Royal from one address to the next, long ago having put aside any pretense of actually using the machine that I had once envisioned employing, Dashiell Hammett-like, to write a sparse novel about a hard boiled, but loveable detective. My Royal quietly collected dust, became a joke for those who noticed it sitting on my desk – “pretty old school, Johnson” – and an object of genuine curiosity for any person under 30.

Tom Hanks – the actor Tom Hanks – prompted me to fall in love again with my Royal. Turns out Mr. Hanks collects typewriters and obviously loves the technology as he wrote recently in the New York Times. “I use a manual typewriter — and the United States Postal Service — almost every day,” Hanks wrote in an August essay. “My snail-mail letters and thank-you notes, office memos and to-do lists, and rough — and I mean very rough — drafts of story pages are messy things, but the creating of them satisfies me like few other daily tasks.”

I have rediscovered the same pleasure.

Although you can’t really say I had abused my mostly unused Royal over the decades I’ve owned it, it was in serious need of cleaning and a tune-up. A new ribbon was in order and a couple of keys stuck over and over. What to do? Like everything else these days one takes to Google to find a service, if it still exists, that once you could look up in the Yellow Pages. My online look-up of typewriter repair lead me to the perfectly named “Ace Typewriter & Equipment Company” on Lombard Street in Portland, Oregon.

The Yelp review says Ace is “the only typewriter repair shop” on the west coast, which may be a little like saying you run the only vacuum tube business in North America, but one step in the door and I was a goner. The dimly lit front rooms were cluttered with old machines. The air was thick with smells of oil and ink. The extremely pleasant and superbly knowledgeable repair guy was certainly old school. He wrote my repair order on a ticket pad, said it would cost $55 for the tune-up, including a new ribbon, and I should check back in a month. “Do you need a deposit?” I asked. “Nope,” was his reply. If any place could make my once very serviceable Royal sing again this was that place.

A month later I was back to collect my lovely refurbished clacker. The unique Royal “touch control” worked perfectly and the years of accumulated dust and grime had been polished away. The new ribbon transferred the ink perfectly. Well, not perfectly, since using a 75 year old typewriter requires a certain discipline that years of tapping on a PC keyboard allows you to forget. You must strike the keys with some passion and, of course, you need to strike the right keys and that, I soon discovered, will require a little practice. I never mastered, even with a high school typing class – remember those – the “touch method.” In the days when a typewriter was the only instrument of choice in the newsroom I pecked away, as I imagined William L. Shirer or Edward R. Murrow once did, with two fingers and both thumbs. It feels good to do it again.

Spend a little time on the web and amazingly you’ll discover a world of typewriter lovers out there. A wonderful paper, card and printing store in Portland – Oblation – celebrated International Typewriter Day this summer by setting up machines on the sidewalk and supplying the paper for passersby. Oblation’s owner Jennifer Rich told the Oregonian, “A type-written love note to somebody or a poem is something you can’t get just anywhere.” Yup.

The guy at Ace said my trusty Royal has been dubbed the Kit Kittredge model because the 10-year-old heroine of The American Girl stories used one in the movie, which I confess I missed, and he said he gets calls every week from some parent looking for such a typewriter for a youngster. That may be one of the more gratifying things I’ve heard in a long, long time.

“Short of chiseled words in stone, few handmade items last longer than a typed letter,” Tom Hanks wrote, “for the ink is physically stamped into the very fibers of the paper, not layered onto the surface as with a laser-printed document or the status-setting IBM Selectric — the machine that made the manual typewriter obsolete. Hit the letter Y on an East German Erika typewriter — careful now, it’s where the Z key is on an English language keyboard because German uses the Z more often — and a hammer strikes an ink-stained ribbon, pressing the dye into the paper where it will be visible for perpetuity unless you paint it over or burn the page.”

I’m expecting to hear that my embrace of my Royal – it’s right here at my right elbow – has taken me from “old school” to “eccentric.” I’m OK with that. Some things old can be new again and besides I have a few letters I need to write.

2016 Election, Fly Fishing, Higher Education, Idaho, Judicial Elections, O'Connor, Supreme Court, Tucson

My Lunch with the Justice

Posted on September 16, 2013by christian

Sandra Day O’Connor’s remarkable career is a testament to many things: dogged persistence, boundless ambition (of the best type), talent, good judgment, a sense of the power of history and, of course, some luck; luck of the being in the right place at the right time variety.

I did not realize until recently, while researching more deeply O’Connor’s history-making 1981 appointment as the first woman nominated to the United States Supreme Court, how determined Ronald Reagan was to put a woman on the Court. Reagan, of course, had made a campaign pledge in 1980 that he wanted to put a “qualified” woman on the Court. When he had the chance just a few months into his term he kept his promise, plucking from relative obscurity the 51-year-old Arizona Court of Appeals Judge and former state senator. So sure was Reagan that he announced O’Connor’s appointment before the FBI had completed its background check leaving then-Attorney General William French Smith to field questions from the White House press corps about whether that was a sound approach.

After a flurry of criticism and concern, most from the far right, O’Connor – imagine this – was confirmed unanimously by the United States Senate just three month after Reagan told her he wanted to put her on the Court.

“Called Judge O’Connor and told her she was my nominee for supreme court,” Reagan wrote in his diary on July 6, 1981. “Already the flak is starting and from my own supporters. Right to Life people say she is pro abortion. She says abortion is personally repugnant to her. I think she’ll make a good justice.”

[Idaho’s then-Sen. Steve Symms was one who voiced early skepticism about O’Connor, but eventually supported her appointment. Symms’ call to the White House expressing disapproval of O’Connor’s nomination is detailed in Jan Crawford Greenburg’s 2007 book Supreme Conflict: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Control of the United States Supreme Court.]

O’Connor’s place in history is secure and not only as the first woman on the Court, but for her historic sense of moderation and pragmatism. She has become a remarkable role model and one hopes her careful, centrist, blocking and tackling approach to the law will one day soon serve as a model for a Supreme Court that seems determined to embrace the type of judicial activism that O’Connor so smartly rejected.

I would have liked to discuss any or all of this with what one lawyer friend called the “smart and tart” justice when I had the rare opportunity to sit next to her at lunch recently during an Andrus Center conference on women and leadership at Boise State University. But I left politics and the law aside after reading how reluctant she can be to offer up any comment, let alone criticism, of the judging of the current justices. [O’Connor did make news a while back with comments about the controversial Bush v. Gore decision, but even then her comments were very measured essentially saying the Court might have been well-advised to refuse to take the case that settled the 2000 presidential election but did little for the Court’s reputation.]

O’Connor’s latest book Out of Order, a history of sorts of the Supreme Court, has been rapped by some reviewers for not dishing inside dope about the Court. The typically acerbic New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani, for example, said: “There are no big revelations in this volume about Bush v. Gore or the author’s thoughts on Roe v. Wade; nor are there momentous insights into the dynamics between Justice O’Connor and her colleagues on the bench, or how she felt about being the crucial swing justice, whom the legal writer Jeffrey Rosen once called ‘the most powerful woman in America.'”

While one would undoubtedly enjoy O’Connor’s unvarnished assessments of all those issues and more, I also admire her restraint, a very O’Connor-like characteristic.

Given the chance to talk with the once “most powerful woman in America” I asked her about her love of fly fishing. O’Connor is a dedicated fly caster. In fact, when then-President George W. Bush tried to reach retiring Justice O’Connor to tell her he had selected John Roberts, a judge as conservative and activist as O’Connor is moderate and careful, to replace her on the Court she was fly fishing in northern Idaho. O’Connor told me that she had little time to fish during her more than 25 years on the Court, but she is clearly making up for lost time. If you are a devotee of the fly rod then you know how easy it can be to form an immediate bond with a stranger – even a very famous stranger – when you share a passion for the pursuit of the wily cutthroat or the gorgeous rainbow.

After fishing in Idaho this month O’Connor was headed for southern Montana to float the Yellowstone with a guide she described as “on a first name basis with every trout in Montana.” To go along with the Andrus Center’s leadership award that former Gov. Cecil D. Andrus presented to the Justice in Boise on September 4, O’Connor also received an honorary doctorate from the University of Montana Law School. She indicated that she very much appreciated the awards, but the chance to fish for a few days was also a big attraction.

She said she has fished in east some, even on the Potomac, and even in Patagonia. While in Montana a couple of years ago hearing cases for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, O’Connor was asked about her favorite Montana river. “Oh, this is a setup!” she replied. “Let’s start with the Big Horn.”

I take real comfort in knowing that the first woman on the Supreme Court knows about the Big Horn and the St. Joe. Who knows, perhaps knowing how to properly swing a fly helps inform the swing vote on the Supreme Court. O’Connor’s other great passions are the importance of civic education and the non-partisan selection of judges and again she is right about both.

As with her long ago critics, O’Connor still gets flack from the far right for warning that money, partisan-style judicial elections and good judging just don’t fit together. O’Connor warned in 2009 that too many state judicial elections – and Idaho has had its share – have become “tawdry and embarrassing” producing judges that are merely “politicians in robes.”

As for civic education, O’Connor quotes truly alarming statistics about American’s lack of knowledge about our history and government. “The more I read and the more I listen, the more apparent it is that our society suffers from an alarming degree of public ignorance,” O’Connor said in Boise. Fewer than a third of Americans can name even one current Supreme Court Justice and “less than one-third of eighth-graders can identify the historical purpose of the Declaration of Independence, and it’s right there in the name,” she said.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/09/06/201376/retired-justice-sandra-day-oconnor.html#storylink=cpy

I’ve been fortunate to interview one president – Gerald Ford – and one future president – Jimmy Carter. I had orange juice and coffee in the Roosevelt Room and stood in the Oval Office for a Bill Clinton Saturday radio speech. George W. Bush invited us to the White House for dinner and I was as surprised as he should have been. I’ve worked for one great governor and interviewed a dozen others and had dinner with big time reporters like Tom Wicker, Dave Broder and Tim Egan. Each and every one a very pleasant memory. Lucky me that I can add Justice O’Connor to the list.

The country has produced few more impressive leaders than the woman from Arizona who started out her legal career volunteering her talents because she couldn’t get a law firm to hire her. Her’s is a uniquely American story and one for the history books. Ronald Reagan was right. She did make a good justice.

Baucus, Congress, Eisenhower, Foreign Policy, Idaho Statehouse, John Kennedy, Middle East, Otter, Paul, Political Correctness, Thatcher, Truman, U.S. Senate, World War II

Return to 1940

Posted on September 4, 2013by christian

Robert Taft, the Ohio senator and son of a GOP president, was often called “Mr. Republican” in the 1940’s and 1950’s. He was continually on everyone’s list as a presidential candidate from the late 1930’s to the early 1950’s, but Taft never received the nomination in large part because he represented the Midwestern, isolationist wing of the GOP in the intra-party fight for supremacy that was eventually won in 1952 by Dwight Eisenhower and the eastern establishment, internationalist wing of the party.

The modern Republican Party is edging toward the same kind of foreign policy split – the John McCain interventionists vs. the Rand Paul isolationists – that for a generation helped kill Taft’s chances, and his party’s chances, of capturing the White House. While much of the focus in the next ten days will be on the important question of whether President Obama can stitch together the necessary votes in the House and Senate – Democrats have their own non-interventionists to contend with – to authorize military action against Syria, the other political fight is over the foreign policy heart and soul of the GOP.

As reported by The Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens here’s some of what those in the new Taft wing of the GOP are saying:

“The war in Syria has no clear national security connection to the United States and victory by either side will not necessarily bring into power people friendly to the United States.” Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.).

“I believe the situation in Syria is not an imminent threat to American national security and, therefore, I do not support military intervention. Before taking action, the president should first come present his plan to Congress outlining the approach, cost, objectives and timeline, and get authorization from Congress for his proposal.” Sen. Mike Lee (R., Utah).

“When the United States is not under attack, the American people, through our elected representatives, must decide whether we go to war.” Rep. Justin Amash (R., Mich.)

Taft’s reputation for personal integrity and senatorial probity – he served as Majority Leader for a short time before his untimely death in 1953 – has guaranteed that he is remembered as one of the Congressional greats of the 20th Century. Still, as Stephen’s writes in the Journal, Taft has also suffered the same fate at the hand of history as almost all of the last century’s isolationists have. They are condemned for what Stephens calls their almost unfailingly bad judgment about foreign affairs. Taft opposed Franklin Roosevelt on Lend-Lease in 1941. He argued against the creation of NATO, which has become an enduring feature of the post-war doctrine of collective security. Taft, always the man of principle, even opposed the Nuremberg trials that sought to bring to the bar of justice the top Nazi leadership of World War II. He considered the legal proceedings, organized and managed by the victors in the war, illegal under existing international law.

In every major showdown in his three-time quest for the presidency, Taft lost to an internationalist oriented Republican: Wendell Willkie in 1940, Thomas E. Dewey in 1944 and Eisenhower in 1952. When given his chance in the White House, and with the help of one-time Taft ally Sen. Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, Eisenhower re-shaped the modern Republican Party for the rest of the century as the party most devoted to national security and most trusted to push back against Soviet-era Communism. That image lasted, more or less, from Ike to the second Bush, whose historic miscalculations in Iraq have helped create the kind of party soul searching for the GOP that Democrats struggled with in the post-Vietnam era.

A vote on Syria in the Congress will be a clear cut test of strength for the neo-isolationists in the modern Republican Party, many of whom have close connections to the Tea Party faction. Still the leaders of the new Taft wing, like Kentucky Sen. Paul, have demonstrated they are not one issues wonders when it comes to foreign policy. Paul filibustered over drone policy, has spoken out against NSA intelligence gathering and frets over foreign aid. And the polls show these skeptics are in sync with the many Americans who are sick of open ended commitments in the Middle East and the kind of “trust us, we’ve got this figured out” foreign policy of the second Bush Administration. I suspect the appeal of the neo-isolationists extends as well to younger voters, many of whom have not known an America that wasn’t regularly sending brave young men and women to fight and die in wars that seem not only to lack an end, but also an understandable and clearly defined purpose.

Bob Taft – Mr. Republican – fought and lost many of these same battles more than half a century ago and since the victors usually write the history Taft stands condemns along with many others in his party for being on the wrong side of the history of the 20th Century.

The great debate in the Congress over the next few days is fundamentally important for many reasons, not least that it is required by the Constitution, but it may also define for a generation how the party that once embraced and then rejected isolation thinks about foreign policy. If Sen. Paul can be cast as a latter day Bob Taft on matters of foreign policy; a questioner of the value and scope of America’s role in the world, who will be this generation’s Wendell Willkie or Dwight Eisenhower?

Any GOP pretender for the White House will need to calculate these issues with great precision. Gov. Chris Christie, who has yet to declare this position but seems more likely to fit in the internationalist wing of the party, must have his world atlas open to the Middle East, but those maps are likely sitting right next to the latest polls showing the increasing isolation of the party’s base; the people who will determine who gets the next shot at presiding in the White House Situation Room. During today’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee vote on Syrian action Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, another 2016 contender, voted NO reinforcing the notion that a new generation of Republicans seem willing to bring to full flower an approach to foreign policy that died about the same time as Bob Taft.

What an irony that the robust, nation building, regime change foreign policy of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, the very definition of GOP orthodoxy in the post-September 11 world, has been so quickly consigned to the dust bin of Republican policy.

Who this time will be on the right – and wrong – side of history?

[Note that Idaho Sen. James Risch joined with Paul and Rubio in voting NO on the Syrian resolution in the Foreign Relations Committee.]

Borah, Cenarrusa, Idaho, Labor Day

Women Who Work

Posted on September 2, 2013by christian

The Labor Day news has been dominated by strikes at fast food restaurants, essays on growing income inequality in the United States and even reports about how increasingly unaffordable higher education is going to make the current generation less likely than their parents to climb into a comfortable middle class life.

All these challenges, and more, are worth the attention of policy makers and lawmakers was we mark another Labor Day, a holiday created in 1896, by the way, as an olive branch to workers by the anti-labor union President Grover Cleveland. We should also add to our list of policy and societal concerns the continuing challenges and inequality that confront women in the work place.

Those fast food strikes aimed at a higher minimum wage are, as Slate points out, mostly about women. “This is a labor movement that is structured largely around the needs articulated by the working mothers in it, women who, with or without a partner, are often trying to raise families on minimum wage jobs. Women make up two-thirds of the fast food work force, and a quarter of workers are raising children.”

At the other end of the economic spectrum – the high end – Fortune reckons that only 21 of the companies in the Fortune 500 are run by women. A 2011 report by Catalyst, an outfit that tracks “critical statistics to gauge women’s advancement into leadership and highlights the gender diversity gap,” found that only 16% of all Fortune 500 board positions where held by women. Fewer than 3% of companies had a woman chair the board of directors, only 1% – a decline from a previous study – had as many as 40% female board members and 11% of the Fortune 500 had absolutely no women in governance roles. Predictably the numbers are even worse for women of color; 3% of board seats of the biggest companies in the United States are held by women of color and 70% of the Fortune 500 have no women of color at all in governance roles.

Some Idaho specific numbers to contemplate when next your order that Whopper from the woman behind the counter: the median income of a working woman in Idaho in 2012 was $18,772 – dead last in the nation with Utah and Montana ahead. (All these numbers are from the website USA.com.) And just to put that $18,722 in context, the poverty level – as officially calculated by the government – is $23,550 for a family of four. A working mom in Idaho who is bringing home the state’s median income and supporting a couple of children is, to say the least, struggling.

But Idaho must be doing better for women in the management and professional ranks, right? Not so much. Nearly 47% of the Idaho work force is made up of women, which is slightly below the national average and just over 35% of those women are employed in “management or professional” positions. That number puts Idaho well below the national average as the 49th state in the nation for women in more traditional “white collar” jobs. Idaho is just ahead of Nevada and Hawaii, states with a particularly high level of service oriented jobs due to their tourism based economies. Idaho’s regional neighbors do substantially as measured by a percentage of women working in white collar jobs: Utah is at 41 in the nation, Montana 28, Oregon 25 and Washington at 15.

So what’s going on here? From the highest reaches of corporate America to the neighborhood coffee shop women seem not to be sharing anything like parity in the work place with men and the gaps haven’t been closing much at all.

Hanna Rosin, a senior editor at The Atlantic and the author of The End of Men, says we’ve focused too much on the “wage gap,” the well-worn statistic that women only make 77 cents on the dollar compared to men. Rosin says there are many reasons for the wage gap, and many are not comforting, including the fact that women often work few hours a week than men, men more often belong to unions (and generally get paid more as a result) and, perhaps the big one, women, despite overtaking men in educational achievement, still gravitate (or perhaps are forced to gravitate) to generally lower paying jobs.

The bigger issues, Rosin says, are “the deeper, more systemic discrimination of inadequate family-leave policies and childcare options, of women defaulting to being the caretakers. Or of women deciding that are suited to be nurses and teachers but not doctors. And in that more complicated discussion, you have to leave room at least for the option of choice—that women just don’t want to work the same way men do.”

Author and educator Stephanie Koontz, who incidentally will speak at a major and sold-out Andrus Center conference on women and leadership this week at Boise State University, made essentially the same point in a New York Times essay earlier this year.

“Astonishingly,” Koontz wrote, “despite the increased workload of families, and even though 70 percent of American children now live in households where every adult in the home is employed, in the past 20 years the United States has not passed any major federal initiative to help workers accommodate their family and work demands. The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 guaranteed covered workers up to 12 weeks unpaid leave after a child’s birth or adoption or in case of a family illness. Although only about half the total work force was eligible, it seemed a promising start. But aside from the belated requirement of the new Affordable Care Act that nursing mothers be given a private space at work to pump breast milk, the F.M.L.A. turned out to be the inadequate end.

“Meanwhile, since 1990 other nations with comparable resources have implemented a comprehensive agenda of ‘work-family reconciliation’ acts. As a result, when the United States’ work-family policies are compared with those of countries at similar levels of economic and political development, the United States comes in dead last.”

As an old friend use to remind me – “all things are political.” Whether its the paltry percentage of women in corporate governance in America, the unlivable minimum wage or work place friendly policies that impact working women and their kids, the public policy response to women who work has, as Stephanie Koontz says, not just stalled, but “hit a wall.” Even Barack Obama, who most thought would take major steps to correct the gender balance in major presidential appointments, has a record leaving much to be desired.

A couple of weeks ago the Nixon Library was in the news as it released the last of Richard Nixon’s White House tape recordings. Less notice was given to some 30,000 pages of documents from the Nixon years that were released at the same time. Two of the pages where a typewritten 1971 memo from Nixon staff assistant Barbara Franklin to White House political advisers Fred Malek and Jeb Magruder. Franklin had just been to a Washington, D.C. conference on the “status of women” – the delegates she wrote were not “radical feminists” but “establishment women” appointed by the nation’s governors – and she wrote excitedly about the standing ovation that had been given at the conclusion of remarks by a woman named Betty Friedan who had issued a stirring call for woman to seek greater political power. [Friedan’s pace setting book The Feminine Mystique had been published in 1963.]

Franklin told Nixon’s political guys in the concluding lines of her memo, “I’m absolutely convinced the ‘women’s issue’ is gathering momentum. We should be listening and thinking!!” Unfortunately that is still appropriate advice to politicians 42 years later.

As Dr. Kootnz has written we need to “stop arguing about the hard choices women make and help more women and men avoid such hard choices. To do that, we must stop seeing work-family policy as a women’s issue and start seeing it as a human rights issue that affects parents, children, partners, singles and elders.”

Women and minorities have provided the electoral power in the last two presidential elections, finally breaking one glass ceiling and putting an African-American in the White House. A woman may well be next and perhaps that will be, at long last, the catalyst for a policy agenda that really addresses women who work.

American Presidents, Foreign Policy, John Kennedy, Middle East, Obama, Truman

A Failure of Politics

Posted on August 31, 2013by christian

When an American president finding himself slipping between the two stools of ill-considered military because he must “save face” or preserve “credibility,” our history shows that we’re about to make a serious, serious mistake.

From Harry Truman to George W. Bush American presidents have committed the United States military to wars based on every justification imaginable from containing Communism to changing a regime to protecting human rights. Lyndon Johnson, we now know, was afraid of being accused of being soft on Communism, so he doubled down on a failed strategy in Indochina in the 1960’s. Bush launched a war in Iraq in order to bring democracy to that made-to-British-order country and we’re still finding out – ten years on – how that mistake is playing out.

Barack Obama was elected and re-elected in no small part because he said he was determined to end America’s endless wars, but now he finds himself on the cusp of military action that could well define his presidency and jerk the violent Middle East into a wide-open regional war. As political analysts Larry Sabato says, “Syria’s in the Middle East. What could possibly go wrong?”

The President stunning mishandling of the apparent use of chemical weapons in Syria has its roots once again in the president’s remarkable disdain for the grubby, critical work of politics. He’s backed himself out on a very long limb largely because he’s refused to engage the political institutions that could have both helped shape the U.S. response to a tin-horned dictator fighting for his life, while destroying his country and given the White House the cover it should have to order – or back down from – touching off the Tomahawk missiles.

First, the Administration dismissed going to the United Nations to attempt to rally world support for action against the Syrian regime with the faulty excuse that Russia’s Vladimir Putin would surely veto effective U.N. action. Of course Putin, a guy playing his own game, would continue to defend his Syrian allies, but so what. I would have liked to have seen the impressive new U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., the noted human rights authority Samantha Power, make the world’s case to the Security Council. The contrast between the moral authority of Power and the United States and the bankrupt cynicism of the Russians, particularly when it would have all been broadcast on Al Jazeera, would have been powerful and important. The U.N. like the U.S. Congress is politics writ large and Obama and his advisers simply blew this world-class moral authority photo opportunity because the politics apparently looked like a loser. The was miscalculation on an historic scale.

Second, when Obama effectively boxed himself in to eventual military action when he declared that Syrian use of chemical weapons was a “red line” that would demand a response, he failed to immediately engage Congress, which just happens to be required by the Constitution, but which would also have provided a political safety valve by involving Obama’s Republican critics in a decision with mind-numbing consequences.

Imagine for a moment if Obama would have immediately had the bi-partisan Congressional leadership and the Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees to the White House. Even better if he could summon them to Washington from their home state politicking during the August recess. He could have publicly insisted that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee do its job and conduct hearings on just what the appropriate U.S. response might entail and let the D.C. press know that he was working the phone to talk to guys like Henry Kissinger, James Baker and Tom Foley. He could have had Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush in for a visit. In other words, he might have engaged in politics. The failure to do so is nothing short of political malpractice.

For all of his ability to employ soaring rhetoric, Obama has a curiously tin ear when it comes to using the Oval Office as the ultimate power play stage in the world. In a crisis the photo of action can be as important as the action.

Failure to embrace the time-consuming, personal and intense political engagement, both on the world and Washington stage, now finds the increasingly isolated and shrinking Obama presidency left to go it alone. It must drive the far right crazy that the French – the French! – are one of the few countries ready to help the U.S.

The once “special relationship” between London and Washington now sits discarded on the curb of the Middle East. Congressional critics from the left and right are demanding, as they should, that Congress not merely be consulted, but actually approve military action. Obama must recognize now, having failed to engage with the politics of bringing Congress along, that he might well lose a vote on military action, as British Prime Minister David Cameron did. That is a risk he simply should have been prepared to take, and as a Constitutional scholar he must know that the law and history require him to take it.

[Update: President Obama did announced today that he will request Congressional authorization for military action against Syria.]

Assume for a moment that the president had mounted a full-court political press and still lost a vote in Congress authorizing military action. Again – so what? He could look the world – and the American public in the eye – and said, “I tried, but our political system refused to engage.” Ironically, sometimes in politics you win by losing. The president could have positioned his Republican Congressional opponents as the party unwilling to take a moral and military stand against chemical weapons. In such a case he would have driven a deep wedge between the John McCain wing of the GOP and the emerging, neo-isolationist Rand Paul wing.

So, in this summer of our discontent, Obama and the country are in a tough spot. Promising to take action against Syria and failing to do so has consequences. Limited military action, particularly when there is no realistic way to anticipate what will happen the day after the action, has consequences. Failing to bring the politics along with the policy has consequences.

The stark reality of Syria, as well as the larger Middle East, is that American military power has reached its limits. None of what ails the region will be solved by a missile strike – even a limited on – and the cost in American blood and treasure in Afghanistan and Iraq is dismal proof of the folly of U.S. “boots on the ground” in a region where religious, sectarian and tribal fights have been a fixture since before Jesus confronted the Romans. As David Brooks wrote today in the Times, “Poison gas in Syria is horrendous, but the real inferno is regional. When you look at all the policy options for dealing with the Syria situation, they are all terrible or too late. The job now is to try to wall off the situation to prevent something just as bad but much more sprawling.”

Barack Obama confront this history and his own presidency with his decisions. He has made it all even more difficult by his failing at politics.