God and the environment.

American candidates and officeholders, most especially but not exclusively those on the right, eagerly invoke God at every given opportunity.  They decry imagined wars against religion in general and Christianity in particular.  They bemoan the fact that faith doesn’t play a greater role in the nation’s public life.  Why doesn’t God have a central presence in everything we do as a nation, they ask.   And then along comes the Pope, spiritual leader of the largest religious group in the world, suggesting that we humans are doing harm to the environment.  How dare he take a “political” stand, and of all things, on science?  Why doesn’t he keep in his appropriately cloistered place?

It’s my understanding that integral to religious teaching, certainly Judeo-Christian teaching, is that we are not proprietors of the earth, but its stewards.   Destroying the earth or endangering it in any way is to sully God’s — the creator’s, — work.  Whether or not you or I may believe in the idea of creation or necessarily in the existence of God, there is no doubt that the Pope who does speaks within a long tradition of faith.  And it’s the most basic faith.  The problem is that he has put the entire climate change, God invoking, deniers on the spot.  He has exposed them of emperors with no clothes, as the falsest of prophets.

It’s interesting that the Rich Santorum’s and Mike Huckabee’s of this world want us to break down the wall between church and state while expressing dismay that the pope should dare poke his religious head into what amounts to a life-and-death public issue.  Could there be any greater concern of religion than that?  Could there be any more important or appropriate “teacher” on the subject than one of the world’s foremost, if not the foremost, religious leaders?

Cutting back, for example, on budgets for education or standing in the way universal healthcare are terrible, even cruel, things to do.  But denying global warming boarders on the criminal.  It puts at risk the entire planet and billions of human beings.  Budgets can be restored and healthcare can be expanded, but climate change is subject to points of no return.  The clock is ticking.   We’re living in the twenty-first century “for God’s sake” and dismissing Darwin as a just another “theory” or denying what the best scientific evidence has concluded is a reality simply boggles the mind.

Obviously the Pope, who teaches the messages of the past, lives in the present and looks to the future — everyone’s future.  He speaks truth to power knowing that it’s just the kind of truth that the prophets spoke in ancient days.   I’m not a Catholic and not a theist, but I do welcome and appreciate the message of this noble man.  At this moment, and on this critical subject, he offers the very best of what religion has to offer.  Regardless of who we are and what we believe, he deserves all of our deepest respect.

Am I ready yet?

Remember — and this surely dates me — the unending parade of clowns emerging center ring from that tiny circus car?  It was always my favorite.  I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but I keep on thinking of that car in watching the continual parade of announced and expected GOP presidential candidates.  Now, don’t get me wrong, these (all but one) men aren’t (Donald Trump notwithstanding) clowns, but they sure are a crowd.  How will primary voters keep track of them, much less differentiate between their similar, largely rightist views?  I guess the good news is that Republicans will have a real choice.  Like them or not, they have a considerable bench.

Despite having a president in the White House, and perhaps because of it, we Democrats don’t have a lot of clowns emerging from a little car.  Indeed, we have a strikingly small bench.  It’s hard to shine when a sitting president looms large and focus is on what his administration does and says.  That’s in part why so many Vice Presidents have taken to the stump when their number one’s time was up.  In recent years, only George H.W. Bush has been able to pull it off.  Of course we have had a nominee-in-waiting for all of Obama’s years.  He prevailed over Hillary Clinton only by a small margin, decided not to make her his running mate but did give her a major place at his table — keep pretenders close.

Some months back, I reported being asked, “Are you ready for Hillary”?  Not so much, I thought at the time and that was probably a shared view.  We hadn’t even entered the fourth quarter of the Obama’s tenure — a fellow Democrat with still much to accomplish.  That alone gave me pause.  It’s not that I don’t admire her, and I certainly am more than ready for a Ms. President.  It’s that in all honestly, I wasn’t that excited about Hillary, much less another Clinton presidency.  Being excited is important.  I was excited about Bill in 1992 and even more so by Barack Obama in 2008.  I happily voted for, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore and John Kerry, but without excitement.  They all lost.  Does America care if I’m excited about a candidate?   Of course not, but excitement, a feeling of shared mission and, yes, passion is what drives us to the polls.  The point isn’t that I was excited about Bill and Barack, but that very many others were as well.

Am I excited about Hillary now?   The answer is, not yet.  Again, I’m not alone.  Amy Davidson’s recent New Yorker piece, “Why Biden Should Run” is just one expression of that unease.   Can I get excited about Hillary?  I think so — hope so — but it will depend on where she stands on the considerable issues we face and also on what kind of a candidate she will be in 2016.  She ended strong in 2008, but it took some time and most of all a serious challenge.  Her “strong finish” came too late.  So I, like Davidson, have been deeply troubled by the lack of a truly credible challenge to her 2016 nomination.   Sure, it’s a relief to see Bernie Sanders, Martin O’Malley and Lincoln Chafee step forward — Jim Webb might join.  These are all good men, but not one has much name recognition and all fall short on mass charisma.  Interestingly, O’Malley alone has been a career long Democrat.  Webb and Chafee were Republicans (before they were Democrats) and Senator Sanders, while organizing with Democrats, is still an avowed independent socialist. 

What does that say about the Democrat’s bench?  For sure, it reflects having a two-term sitting president but also how few in the party sit in governor’s mansions.  Governors — Carter, Clinton, and Dukakis, not to mention Roosevelt — are staples on any party’s bench.  It also tells you that few Democratic senators have built much of a national profile and those who have are either too old, too young or have expressed no real interest in the presidency.  One can’t blame them; it’s tough to get there and worse once elected.  That grey hair on a still young Obama’s head, a trait shared by most of his predecessors, evidences the unique stresses of the job.

Forgetting name recognition and charisma for the moment, I have to give Bernie Sanders special credit for his passion and for presenting an unvarnished and uncompromising liberal point of view.  He’s getting some very good press and a bump in the Iowa and New Hampshire polls.  He has next to zero chance of winning the nomination or even a place on the ticket.  I’m old enough to remember the doomed George McGovern campaign (on which Hillary worked).  He was one of the most decent and courageous of American politicians.  Perhaps even more so that him, Sanders candidacy is LOA — Lost on Arrival.  Chafee is probably in the same position.  What’s interesting about him, more so than Jim Webb, is that his candidacy speaks volumes to how conservatively monolithic the Republican Party has become.  The Chafee’s (father and son) were from the so-called Rockefeller Wing of their party, a group that has gone from being an endangered species to extinction. 

Can Bernie, Martin, Lincoln and Jim “Who” present a real challenge for Hillary “Clinton, of course”?  I seriously doubt it.   Can their challenge force her to be more progressive rather than middle-of-the-road?  Perhaps, and that would certainly be a good thing.  We know a lot about Hillary’s past; we have yet to hear where she wants to take the country going forward.  She started that process this past weekend on Roosevelt Island, but it was only a beginning.  Her past has much to admire, but also areas of real concern.  While the time was not yet right to pull it off, she certainly was an early and impassioned proponent of healthcare reform.  It was she, not Obama, who brought it into the 2008 campaign.  So she surely deserves some credit for the ACA.  Hillary has been a consistent and substantive fighter for minority and (most especially) women’s rights.  She devoted substantial time and prestige during her tenure at State to raise and address women’s issue around the globe.  On the other hand, she has always been a foreign policy hawk.  That drove her to support invading Iraq and to be on the aggressive side of the Administration’s internal debates about other challenges in the region.  She supported deploying more troops in Afghanistan and is said to have favored much greater involvement in Syria.  The latter is especially troubling.

As my last post suggested, I don’t have high hopes for serious debate in 2016.  I certainly hope that immigration and, most especially, income inequality will be on the table.  But again I fear more posturing than a serious conversation.  Income inequality especially is a big part of Sanders’ campaign.  Clinton should have no problem with immigration and indeed is very popular in the Latino community that cares so much about paths to citizenship.  She reiterated her support of it in the New York speech.  Income inequality presents a greater challenge, which accounts for all the focus on the Clinton foundation and speaking fees.  If few Americans are members of the business 1%, even fewer are among those who command $100,000 plus for an hour at the lectern.  Ask a leading author or academic what she is normally paid for speaking, even keynoting a large conference.  Of course, we have had rich presidents who championed the economically stressed — most notably FDR and JFK — but Hillary and Bill are poster people for our current income disparity relative to pay for work done.  She will be hard pressed on that subject.

Do Americans care about her newfound wealth or how it has been amassed?  That remains to be seen.  As I’ve written before, the obscene compensation or corporate CEOs and top executives in contrast to that of the average employee appalls me.  Equally disturbing the revolving door (see Mark Leibovich’s, This Town) that has allowed former elected and appointed officials rake in millions, often lobbying the very people with whom they served.  Would Bill Clinton be making the fees that have made him multi-millionaire virtually over night had he not been president?  Of course not.  Will financial machinations sink Hillary’s candidacy?   It’s hard to say, but it’s probably one of the reasons that I remain unexcited about her.  I hope she will find a way to assuage my concerns.  This will be an important election,  I know we say that every time, but it seems even more so for 2016.  We’ve seen what Republican control can do, what their Supreme Court appointees can do.  Living in North Carolina, I see it up close and personal.  We can’t afford to blow the upcoming vote.

Our great divide.

Early in January 1960, Senator John F. Kennedy announced for the presidency — eleven months before the November vote.  Barack Obama did so on May 2, 2007, about seventeen months before his.  This March 28th Ted Cruz tweeted, “I’m running for president”, almost nineteen months before we go to the polls.  So here we are, engulfed in another endless campaign season.  Call it broken or what you will; the system is certainly out-of-control.  Consider the recent May 7^th UK vote.  Their campaign spans about three weeks.  Victor David Cameron presented his credentials to the queen the morning after and had a cabinet in place within days.   Our post election transition takes over two months. 

Why do we do this to ourselves?  Why are our public officials and aspirant officeholders in perpetual campaign mode?  Of course, vanity and wanting desperately to hold on is a factor, but these days money looms largest.  It takes bundles to run for even relatively modest offices.  So most of today’s candidates are well healed or just plain rich.  Citizen United further exacerbated an obscene dollar chase.  Billionaires with vested interests are given license to effectively select candidates and then underwrite their campaigns.  For sure they want something in return.  If the Justices who voted to gut campaign finance reform don’t feel some ruling-remorse for what they let out of Pandora’s box; shame on them.  All these years after, Richard Nixon, whose high crimes sparked campaign reform, comes out the winner.  It’s not Nixon’s posthumous victory that’s so painful, but that we all are the losers.  I don’t think it’s overstated to say that the new world of so-called “silent primaries” puts our democracy at great risk.  One can only hope that what has been set in motion will be reversed.

As we look toward 2016, the country faces many fundamental and vexing problems at home and abroad.  I fear, and with good reason, that few of them will be seriously addressed during the campaign.  We don’t have serious public conversations, especially in election seasons where beauty contests, gotcha moments, purposeful vagueness and polling scorecards rule the day.   Led by a headline seeking media, we seem to care more about a candidate’s stumbling over some question or an embarrassing line written in one among thousands of emails than where they want to take the nation in the future.  Rather than engaging in substantive discussion, our presidential candidates engage in superficial posturing.  The contest boils down to a version of “trivial pursuit”, something that is both maddening and fraught with danger.  No wonder the officeholder often is not necessarily the person we thought we had elected.

In the endless months ahead there will be plenty of time to address some of the issues that confront us as a nation.  The world is a vastly different place than when JFK took the oath on a frigid January 1961 day and even since Obama stood before an unprecedented crowd in 2009.  The latter tells you something about the time in which we now live.  For this writing I’d like to focus on a single problem that in some ways may most endanger our present and future.  It’s one that is unlikely to get much, if any, airtime in the presidential contest.  I’m talking about our great divide.

On July 27, 2004 a young and relatively unknown Illinois legislator running for the US Senate burst upon the national scene with a career making speech at the Democratic Convention.  To my knowledge, he is the only keynoter — Democratic or Republican — whose address propelled him into the White House.  Barack Obama spoke of America coming together, “E pluribus unum, out of many, one.”  But he said, “even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes.”  It was a notion that he rejected. “…I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America; there's the United States of America.  There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America.”  Tracing Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign and his early years in the White House, I think this idea of unity — this hope for unity — expressed the very core of his political being.  Would that it had been shared.

It’s hard to pinpoint precisely when the great divide took shape, but it raised its ugly hear most conspicuously during the Clinton years.  Despite winning two terms and his current popularity, Bill Clinton was plagued from the start with often-fabricated scandals and, not being a scion of the “ruling class”, challenges to his legitimacy.  The bitterness rose to a new crescendo with Newt Gingrich’s provocative “Contract with America”.  If Republicans questioned Clinton’s legitimacy, Democrats felt that same about George W. Bush’s effectual elevation by what they considered a blatantly partisan Supreme Court decision.  That feeling dissipated somewhat following 9/11 but divisiveness was soon rekindled by the president’s “are you with me or against me” rhetoric and attitude in the wake of Iraq.  Obama’s election, challenged again as illegitimate — how could a black man (not one of us) be president — only widened the divide.  It was the exactly opposite of what he wanted.

Obama’s 2004 clarion call for “one America” wasn’t merely rhetorical.  It was visceral.  I have come to believe that he was, and sadly continues to be, the wrong messenger.  Why?  Because the great divide doesn’t have as much to do with political affiliation or conflicting ideologies as one might think.  Rather (as suggested earlier posts), it reflects a reaction, also visceral, to the specter of current and impending change.  It is disruptive change that challenges the assumed “order”.   Things are just not what they have always been.  This doesn’t mean that politics and ideology don’t influence our view of change, but that to some degree the lines are far more blurred and complicated than broad-brush labels suggest.  In facing this particular kind of change, you may understand why Obama is probably the wrong messenger.  Simply put, he personifies exactly what has so unsettled many Americans.  He is the looming probability that white citizens will lose their majority and for some that Christianity — his faith is always questioned — and indeed religion is losing ground.  Add to this that assumed “eternal” institutions are being redefined.  It just drives us crazy.

Not me, you’ll say and perhaps with some justification.   But don’t pound the table in your indignation, because fundamental change is something that universally unnerves.  We may commend or even promote it in the abstract, but we’re concurrently wedded to our “way of life" and the comfortable/familiar status quo.  Just last week the NY Times reported on the 200 highest paid public company CEO’s.  Forget for a moment the out of proportion and indeed obscenity of these numbers.  What stands out, again, is that only 13 women make the cut.  No surprise, their average salary was 9.4% less than men in comparable jobs.  What does a CEO look like?  Well he is predominantly white elected by — you guessed it — a largely white male board.  Presidents just don’t look like Obama, nor do “first families” look like his.  (If you want to see an unvarnished expression of that, consider the horrendous tweets sent to him this past week.)  Again, you’ll say “not for me”, but close your eyes and honestly picture the image that matches the titles CEO and US President.

The world is changing disruptively in real time and it’s more than our emotions can take.  We know what should be, and damn it; those who see it differently are a bunch of luddites.  We know the truth and it’s clear what they claim is nothing but a vapid misguided forgery — on its face, something totally illegitimate.  So we tune into Bill O’Reilly or, yes, Rachel Maddow, largely for self-vindication, cheering most loudly when offered our favorite red meat.  We judge what is said, by who says it — consider the source — not by its content.  In fact, we don’t even wait to hear the argument.  If it’s coming from the right brand, we’re on board, no questions asked, all in.  If it’s coming from the “other side”, we just assume its something we oppose.  And we’re quick judge and also to write off anyone who strays fro the path.  Translate that, says something contrary to our views on some particular issue.  Take, when columnist Tom Friedman, a darling of progressives, supported the Iraq war.  That single issue position lost him some “loyal” readers even though his analysis and stands on a host of other issues were in line with their own thinking and views.  Even more so, if we’re liberal, we don’t bother to read conservative writers, no matter the subject.  We don’t want to be “upset” — translation again: to be challenged.

Okay, so we’re divided.  What’s the big deal?   Well this kind of division is a potential killer — paraphrasing John Dean, “a cancer on the country”.  Just take a look at what’s been going on, or more accurately not going on, in Washington.  The vitriol and animosity is so extreme that government is at a virtual standstill.  People complain — and rightly so — of expanding executive power, but the dysfunction of Congress has given license to presidents taking actions on their own.  The Supreme Court, once a place where justices would often surprise or would evolve over time, seems now to be a place of only firmly fixed (as in concrete) ideologically driven views.  It is deeply divided and probably for the same reasons.  We’ve learned not to expect purely judicious decisions, an open reading of the facts and the law.  Our main concern is which party will control the White House the next time a seat opens up.

We’re unlikely to have a thoughtful and satisfying election cycle because candidates are expected to fulfill their ideological mandates.  You won’t hear one nominee say to another, “what an interesting point, I’ll really have to consider that.”  Oh yes, they will mouth that their opponent comes to her or his views out of honest conviction, but they can’t fool us.  They won’t really mean it.  For them, and for too many of us, everything is a zero sum game.  Our debate, and that’s what everything is, has lost any sense of mutual respect or, more importantly any evidence of the slightest self-doubt or humility.   We know the answers; we possess the truth — end of story.  We’re participants in and committed to the great divide.   After Obama’s failure to bridge the gap with his one America speech and first term efforts, we seem to have given up and given in.  So it’s unlikely that anyone will be taking up divisiveness, much less raising a unity flag, in 2016.  That’s predictable, but at some point poison water kills.  The problem won’t just go away.  Someone will need to step up to the plate. Hopefully someone from our fading status quo majority will have the courage to be that person, to essentially say, “I’ve changed my mind.  It’s time to embrace the future.”  Yes, the great divide and how we might overcome it won’t be a subject for discussion in 2016.  That’s too bad because, above all else, it may be our most pressing problem.