Well, better VERY late than never, I guess. My intertubez were out this morning. Here we go:
MoDo is off today. The Pasty Little Putz thinks he has something worth saying about “The Enduring Cult of Kennedy.” He gurgles that the myths of the Kennedy presidency are resurrected again with Stephen King’s new novel. The Moustache of Wisdom, in “In the Arab World, It’s the Past vs. the Future.” He says as the fighting continues in Egypt and Syria, crucial questions are raised. Mr. Bruni, in “Craven Political Crudités,” says this presidential race is shaping up to be an especially mendacious ride, and not just because the two Republicans currently in the lead have demonstrated a formidable talent for improvisation. Mr. Kristof, in “President as Piñata,” says President Obama came into office with expectations that Superman couldn’t have met. Let’s remember his accomplishments and keep some perspective at election time. Here, heaven help us, is the Putz:
The cult of John F. Kennedy has the resilience of a horror-movie villain. No matter how many times the myths of Camelot are seemingly interred by history, they always come shambling back to life — in another television special, another Vanity Fair cover story, another hardcover hagiography.
It’s fitting, then, that the latest exhumation comes courtesy of Stephen King himself. King serves a dual role in our popular culture: He’s at once the master of horror and the bard of the baby boom, writing his way through the twilit borderlands where the experiences of the post-World War II generation are stalked by nightmares and shadowed by metaphysical dread.
In this landscape, the death of J.F.K. looms up like the Overlook Hotel. The gauzy fantasy of the Kennedy White House endures precisely because the reality of the assassination still feels like a primal catastrophe — an irruption of inexplicable evil as horrifying as any supernatural bogeyman.
At its best, King’s new Kennedy assassination novel, “11/22/63” — which sends its protagonist back in time to change that November day’s events — offers an implicit critique of this generational obsession. (I am not giving much away when I reveal that the time-traveling hero does not succeed in freeing ’60s America from the cruel snares of history.) But its narrative power still depends on accepting the false premises of the Kennedy cult — premises that will no doubt endure so long as the 1960s generation does, but still deserve to be challenged at every opportunity.
The first premise is that Kennedy was a very good president, and might have been a great one if he’d lived. Few serious historians take this view: It belongs to Camelot’s surviving court stenographers, and to popularizers like Chris Matthews, whose new best seller “Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero” works hard to gloss over the thinness of the 35th president’s actual accomplishments. Yet there is no escaping the myth’s hold on the popular imagination. In Gallup’s “greatest president” polling, J.F.K. still regularly jostles with Lincoln and Reagan for the top spot.
In reality, the kindest interpretation of Kennedy’s presidency is that he was a mediocrity whose death left his final grade as “incomplete.” The harsher view would deem him a near disaster — ineffective in domestic policy, evasive on civil rights and a serial blunderer in foreign policy, who barely avoided a nuclear war that his own brinksmanship had pushed us toward. (And the latter judgment doesn’t even take account of the medical problems that arguably made him unfit for the presidency, or the adulteries that eclipsed Bill Clinton’s for sheer recklessness.)
The second false premise is that Kennedy would have kept us out of Vietnam. Or as a character puts it in “11/22/63,” making the case for killing Lee Harvey Oswald: “Get rid of one wretched waif, buddy, and you could save millions of lives.”
Actually, it would be more accurate to describe the Vietnam War as Kennedy’s darkest legacy. His Churchillian rhetoric (“pay any price, bear any burden …”) provided the war’s rhetorical frame as surely as George W. Bush’s post-9/11 speeches did for our intervention in Iraq. His slow-motion military escalation established the strategic template that Lyndon Johnson followed so disastrously. And the war’s architects were all Kennedy people: It was the Whiz Kids’ mix of messianism and technocratic confidence, not Oswald’s fatal bullet, that sent so many Americans to die in Indochina.
The third myth is that Kennedy was a martyr to right-wing unreason. Writing on J.F.K. in the latest issue of New York magazine, Frank Rich half-acknowledges the mediocrity of Kennedy’s presidency. But he cannot resist joining a generation of liberals in drawing a connection between the right-wing “atmosphere of hate” in early-1960s Dallas and the assassination itself — and then linking both to today’s anti-Obama zeal. Neither can King, whose “11/22/63” explicitly compares right-wing Dallas to his own fictional territory of Derry, Me. — home of the murderous Pennywise the Clown from “It,” among other demons.
This connection is the purest fantasy, made particularly ridiculous by the fact that both Rich and King acknowledge that Oswald was a leftist — a pro-Castro agitator whose other assassination target was the far-right segregationist Edwin Walker. The idea that an atmosphere of right-wing hate somehow inspired a Marxist radical to murder a famously hawkish cold war president is even more implausible than the widespread suggestion that the schizophrenic Jared Lee Loughner shot his congresswoman because Sarah Palin put some targets on an online political map.
This last example suggests why the J.F.K. cult matters — because its myths still shape how we interpret politics today. We confuse charisma with competence, rhetoric with results, celebrity with genuine achievement. We find convenient scapegoats for national tragedies, and let our personal icons escape the blame. And we imagine that the worst evils can be blamed exclusively on subterranean demons, rather than on the follies that often flow from fine words and high ideals.
What a poisonous little shit he is. Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:
In 2001, a book came out about George Mitchell’s diplomatic work in Northern Ireland that was entitled “To Hell With the Future, Let’s Get On With the Past.” One hopes that such a book will never be written about today’s Arab awakenings. But watching events unfold out there makes it impossible not to ask: Will the past bury the future in the Arab world or will the future bury the past?
I am awed by the bravery of the Syrian and Egyptian youths trying to throw off the tyranny of the Assad family and the Egyptian military. The fact that they go into the streets — knowing they face security forces who will not hesitate to gun them down — speaks of the deep longing of young Arabs to be free of the regimes that have so long choked their voices and prevented them from realizing their full potential.
But I am deeply worried that the longer the fighting continues in Syria and Egypt, the less chance that any stable, democratizing order will emerge anytime soon and the more likely that Syria could disintegrate into civil war. You can’t exaggerate how dangerous that would be. When Tunisia was convulsed by revolution, it imploded. When Egypt was convulsed by revolution, it imploded. When Libya was convulsed by revolution, it imploded. If Syria is convulsed by revolution, it will not implode. Most Arab states implode. Syria explodes.
Why? Because Syria is the keystone of the Levant. It borders and balances a variety of states, sects and ethnic groups. If civil war erupts there, every one of Syria’s neighbors will cultivate, and be cultivated by, different Syrian factions — Sunnis, Alawites, Kurds, Druse, Christians, pro-Iranians, pro-Hezbollahites, pro-Palestinians, pro-Saudis — in order to try to tilt Syria in their direction. Turkey, Lebanon, Hezbollah, Iraq, Iran, Hamas, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Israel all have vital interests in who rules in Damascus, and they will all find ways to partner with proxies inside Syria to shape events there. It will become a big Lebanon-like brawl.
Syria needs a peaceful democratic transition set in motion now. Ditto Egypt. But that is easier said than done. Events in both countries are a reminder of the multidimensional struggle for power across the Middle East — what I once described as the struggle between “The Lexus and the Olive Tree.”
On one level, you have the very modern, deeply felt and truly authentic longing by Syrians and Egyptians for freedom, for the skills to thrive in modernity and for the rights of real citizens.
Outsiders often underestimate just how much these Arab youths are determined to limit the powers of their militaries as a necessary step for achieving true democracy. What you see in Egypt today are young people from across the political spectrum and classes who are willing to join forces, break ranks with their own parties and return to Tahrir Square to press for real freedom. This is a generational rupture. It is the old versus the young. It is the insiders (the adults) versus the outsiders (the youth). It is the privileged old guard versus the disadvantaged young guard. These young Egyptians, and Syrians, who have stopped fearing their military masters, are determined to unleash a true transformation in their world. We should be on their side.
But the weight of their history is so heavy. The new Lexus-like values of “democracy,” “free elections,” “citizen rights” and “modernity” will have to compete with some very old Olive Tree ideas and passions. These include the age-old civil wars within Islam between Sunnis and Shiites, over who should dominate the faith, the heated struggle between Salafists and modernists over whether the 21st century should be embraced or rejected, as well as the ancient tribal and regional struggles playing out within each of these societies. Last, but not least, you have the struggle between the entrenched military/crony elites and the masses. These struggles from the “past” always threaten to rise up, consume any new movement for change and bury “the future.”
This is the grand drama now being played out in the Arab world — the deeply sincere youth-led quest for liberty and the deeply rooted quests for sectarian, factional, class and tribal advantage. One day it looks as though the revolutions in Egypt, Syria and Tunisia are going to be hijacked by forces and passions from the past while the next day that longing of young people to be free and modern pushes them back.
The same drama played out in Iraq, but there the process was managed, at a huge cost, by an American midwife — managed enough so that the communities were able to write a new, rudimentary social contract on how to live together and, thereby, give the future a chance to bury the past. But we still do not know how it will end in Iraq.
We know, though, that there will be no impartial outside midwife to guide the transitions in Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, Libya and Yemen. Can they each make it without one? Only if they develop their own Nelson Mandelas — unique civic leaders or coalitions who can honor the past, and contain its volcanic urges, but not let it bury the future.
Now here’s Mr. Bruni:
Barack Obama hates Thanksgiving and all that it represents.
Don’t believe me? Then consider his own words. On Wednesday, previewing our annual overconsumption of fowl, the president said, “Tomorrow is one of the worst days of the year to be American.”
O.K., fine, he didn’t say it exactly like that. I attached the bulk of a sentence near the start of his remarks to the last word of a later sentence, and if you want to be a stickler, his “worst” sentiment in its original form referred to the predicament of oven-bound turkeys, not the experience of people gorging on them.
Even so. He did utter each of those syllables, in that precise order. I smell a Mitt Romney ad in the making.
A day earlier, the doomsayer in chief was in even finer fettle. Speaking in New Hampshire, he callously told Americans who are hurting financially and hungry for a turnaround that they shouldn’t hold their breath.
True, that wasn’t the language he actually used. “It’s going to take time,” Obama said, to rebuild an ailing economy, eliminate tax loopholes and invest appropriately in education.
But the gist of that message? The government is like the airport on Thanksgiving weekend — expect significant delays! — and citizens must adopt the long view, even if their houses are in foreclosure and their cars are being repossessed. I can certainly hear Rick Perry characterizing it that way, although with several verbal bobbles and a few seconds of staring blankly into space.
There are still more than 11 fractious, exceedingly long months before the 2012 election, but already the main players’ approach to the truth is rather like a Veg-o-Matic’s to carrots and celery. They slice and dice it to a fare-thee-well, and serve craven political crudités.
The week before last, Perry released a commercial that lambasted Obama for calling Americans lazy, though Obama had said nothing so unfeeling. His comment was that the country’s government and corporate community had been somewhat lazy over recent decades about attracting foreign investment.
And last week, Romney released a commercial with footage in which Obama stated, “If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.” As it happens, Obama was describing how the McCain campaign assessed McCain’s situation during the 2008 general election, and the clip was from back then. The Romney TV spot dispensed with all that pesky context.
When this flagrant misdirection was pointed out, the Romney campaign’s reaction was unapologetic pride.
“We’re not going to take our foot off the gas pedal,” crowed a senior aide, Eric Fehrnstrom. So long as everyone’s playing fast and loose with quotations, Team Obama should hold on to that one and perhaps cast it as evidence of Romney’s inability to relate to the average American, whose reaction to brutal fuel prices traditionally has been to go easy, not hard, on the accelerator.
Buckle up, folks. This presidential race is shaping up to be an especially mean and mendacious ride, and not just because the two Republicans currently in the lead, Romney and Newt Gingrich, have demonstrated a formidable talent for improvisation, starting with thorough revisions of their own positions on health care, climate change and such. They’re a limber duo, primed to teach classes on political yoga. Gingrich’s wife probably gave him a Tiffany-bejeweled mat.
But their specific contortions and distortions are no more worrisome than the backdrop against which this campaign unfolds, one of toxic partisanship and breathless hyperbole.
Romney has been on the receiving as well as the giving end of this: last month, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, warned that he wanted to “privatize Social Security and allow Wall Street brokers to gamble” with retirees’ pensions. What he has said is that the 2008 market collapse convinced him that privatization was a dangerous idea.
But facts count for little when there’s fear mongering to be done. Just ask Michele Bachmann, the source of the ludicrous assertion, ginned up to smear Perry, that a vaccine for the human papillomavirus causes mental retardation.
Is all of this hot air part of a broader climate of unprincipled hucksterism? As a country we’ve shifted emphasis from goods to services, manufacturing to marketing, and everyone natters on about the importance of brand rather than the quality of product — about the sell rather than the substance.
I think politics has followed suit, and politicians, stuck in a sclerotic system that renders real accomplishment difficult, lavish more energy on words than on elusive deeds. What matters is what they can convince voters of and how voters are left feeling about them — and their foes — as a result.
Look at the deficit-reduction supercommittee. As it sputtered to the finish line, how did its members spend the final days? Not with a last-ditch stab at compromise, according to many news reports, but with separate discussions among Republicans and Democrats about how to emerge from the debacle looking better than the other side. The endgame wasn’t about outcomes. It was about positioning.
The raw state of the electorate and the prospect of an extremely close race between Obama and his opponent also suggest that the 2012 presidential campaign could take on a desperate, profoundly dishonest edge. Obama isn’t there yet, but he also won’t be in the thick of things until he knows who his Republican adversary is.
When that happens, how low will his own road go? It’s worth noting that in 2008, when he ridiculed McCain for supposedly not wanting to talk about the economy, he used the words of an unnamed McCain adviser, who had spoken anonymously to a reporter. So last week’s misleading Romney ad corrupted material that was corrupt to begin with.
Many Democrats say privately that the Republican nominee will need to be savaged for the president to prevail. And the Web site Politico asserted in an article last summer that Obama’s allies were prepared, should Romney be the nominee, to stress his weirdness, which sounds an awful lot like a proxy putdown for his being Mormon. The White House denied any such strategy.
Whatever the case, candidates clearly don’t envision much of a penalty on Election Day for having slung mud and tortured the truth in attacking opponents. I bet Romney’s aides expected — and saw an upside to — the charges of foul play prompted by their ad. The coverage of it reached many more voters than the ad itself did, and that attention ultimately underscored Romney’s overarching assertion that Obama should be ashamed of his economic performance. If Romney came across as shifty in the process, well, that was apparently a small price to pay.
But there’s a larger cost, borne not just by the candidates but, sadly, by the rest of us, too. Campaigns waged with lies presage governments racked by distrust. The sclerosis starts there. And I don’t think this country can endure much more of it without profound, lasting damage.
Now here’s Mr. Kristof:
A year before President Obama faces re-election, take a look at what has happened to other Western leaders confronting voters in this economic vortex.
Spain’s Socialist government was defeated in a crushing landslide vote a week ago, leaving the party with its fewest members of Parliament since democratic elections were introduced in 1977. That’s the pattern for incumbents from Ireland to Finland, Portugal to Denmark: Spain’s was the eighth government to topple in Europe in two years.
In this economic crisis, Obama will face the same headwinds. That should provide a bracing warning to grumbling Democrats: If you don’t like the way things are going right now, just wait.
President Obama came into office with expectations that Superman couldn’t have met. Many on the left believed what the right feared: that Obama was an old-fashioned liberal. But the president’s cautious centrism soured the left without reassuring the right.
Like many, I have disappointments with Obama. He badly underestimated the length of this economic crisis, and for a man with a spectacular gift at public speaking, he has been surprisingly inept at communicating.
But as we approach an election year, it is important to acknowledge the larger context: Obama has done better than many critics on the left or the right give him credit for.
He took office in the worst recession in more than half a century, amid fears of a complete economic implosion. As The Onion, the satirical news organization, described his election at the time: “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job.”
The administration helped tug us back from the brink of economic ruin. Obama oversaw an economic stimulus that, while too small, was far larger than the one House Democrats had proposed. He rescued the auto industry and achieved health care reform that presidents have been seeking since the time of Theodore Roosevelt.
Despite virulent opposition that has paralyzed the government, Obama bolstered regulation of the tobacco industry, signed a fair pay act and tightened control of the credit card industry. He has been superb on education, weaning the Democratic Party from blind support for teachers’ unions while still trying to strengthen public schools.
In foreign policy, Obama has taken a couple of huge risks. He approved the assault on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan, and despite much criticism he led the international effort to overthrow Muammar el-Qaddafi. So far, both bets are paying off.
Granted, the economic downturn overshadows all else, as happens in every presidency. Ronald Reagan, the Teflon president, saw his job approval rating sink to 35 percent in January 1983 because of economic troubles. A faltering economy sent the popularity of the first president Bush into a tailspin, tumbling to 29 percent in 1992.
By comparison, President Obama has about a 43 percent approval rating, according to Gallup.
Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois tells me he thinks that liberals will eventually unite behind the president. “It’s never going to be the first date we had four years ago,” he said. “But I don’t question the fact that he’ll have the support of the left.”
Still, it’s hard to see how Obama will replicate the turnout that swept him into office, or repeat victories in crucial states like Florida and Ohio.
Then again, Republicans face a similar enthusiasm gap with their likely nominee, Mitt Romney. (Republicans keep searching for any other candidate who they think would be electable, when they already have one: Jon Huntsman. They just don’t like him.)
Earlier this month, I asked Bill Clinton — who has a better intuitive feel for politics than anyone I know — about Obama’s chances for re-election. “I’ll be surprised if he’s not re-elected,” Clinton said, adding that Obama would do better when matched against a specific opponent like Romney.
Clinton said that Romney did “a very good job” as governor of Massachusetts and would be a credible general election candidate. But Clinton added that Romney or any Republican nominee would be hampered by “a political environment in the Republican primary that basically means you can’t be authentic unless you’ve got a single-digit I.Q.”
I’m hoping the European elections will help shock Democrats out of their orneriness so that they accept the reality that we’ll be facing not a referendum, but a choice. For a couple of years, the left has joined the right in making Obama a piñata. That’s fair: it lets off steam, and it’s how we keep politicians in line.
But think back to 2000. Many Democrats and journalists alike, feeling grouchy, were dismissive of Al Gore and magnified his shortcomings. We forgot the context, prided ourselves on our disdainful superiority — and won eight years of George W. Bush.
This time, let’s do a better job of retaining perspective. If we turn Obama out of office a year from now, let’s make sure it is because the Republican nominee is preferable, not just out of grumpiness toward the incumbent during a difficult time.
