Letter 2 America for October 11, 2013

Dear America,

I think often now about what American politics has become.  There used to be heroic figures...perhaps Bunyanesque would be a better adjective...who prowled the halls of congress and periodically ascended to the presidency.  They controlled their spheres of influence with a kind of personal gravitas that was more potent even than charisma.  JFK had charisma, and even his memory lingers though there is some doubt that he really achieved much in his three years in the White House.  But LBJ had gravitas.  I have read accounts of meetings he had with senators and congressmen who were resisting his initiatives, such as The Great Society program that he wanted to create.  It was a vision he had about this country that went to the substance of who we are rather than what we seem to be.  It wasn't about American Exceptionalism, which is just a euphemism for what used to be called chauvinism, and it wasn't a political conceit meant to be the manifestation of a personal legacy to which Johnson would then be able to point in the aftermath of his presidency.  It was aspirational, and not for Johnson, but for Johnson's nation, which I truly believe he loved.  He had the misfortune to be handed an unpopular war by his fallen predecessor, who in turn had received it in its nascency from his predecessor, but by the time Johnson was saddled with Vietnam, it was the historic event that made the word quagmire a matter of common parlance.  That war overshadowed his domestic accomplishments and was emblematic of Johnson's tenure as president for years after his death, but he changed the United States in the same way as Franklin D. Roosevelt did, though much of what he did was subsequently mismanaged and doomed to a demise caused by its ossification in a petty-partisan ethos that became ever more so. Even today the efforts to change what Johnson did with welfare for example are failures because no one has actually come up with a better idea for how to raise the poor out of their poverty, which was a noble goal then and is still noble.

Then of course there was FDR himself, and the legacy he left in the form of Social Security far overshadows the mistakes he made in managing the reemergence of our economy from The Depression for example, which he eventually did manage to accomplish with his persistence and fortitude.  But like Kennedy, and unlike Johnson who succeeded despite a lack of it, Roosevelt's charisma carried the day, and in the end, the opposing party had no choice but to bend to his will because he made his will the popular will by the mere force of his personality.  The cogency of Keynesian theory would not have been enough, as it hasn't been this time around, and while I voted for President Obama twice, he's no FDR...and no Lyndon Johnson either for that matter with his afternoon mini-events putting citizens in favor of Obamcare on display in the Rose Garden in lieu of excoriating speeches after dinner when everyone has his television on.  Then, there were Speakers of The House who left their marks in Washington.  They all have their offices now in a building named for Sam Rayburn, who was a legend before he was dead.  And Everett Dirkson was another, his gravelly voice often the one that carried the weight necessary to get things done.  Then there was Tip O'Neil, who gets mentioned often in the context of Boehner's government shutdown as if it is the same thing as when Tip did it.  He was a Boston pol first, but an arch master of politics because of it in a time when first a Southern Baptist milquetoast, Jimmy Carter, allowed the country to persist in a decline because he was abstemious and lusted only in his heart, and then when an arch demagogue, Ronald Reagan, succeeded Carter and had the ear of the American People...at least in the beginning of his administration.  Whether he was right or wrong, presidents listened when O'Neill spoke.  And Bill Clinton could have been one of those Bunyans of American politics too if he hadn't been so concupiscent and misguided in some of his policies, such as liberating the financial industry from the only safeguard against the avarice and predation that is at its core by signing the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act.  And his acquiescence in the dismantling of some of Johnson's Great Society mechanism in the form of what goes by the name of "welfare reform" was nothing but a license for those who never cared about the poor to make it still harder for them during already hard times.  We have had these struggles over extending federal unemployment benefits for example only because welfare is no longer available to carry people through protracted periods like this one in which there just are not jobs to get...at least none worth getting.

No, the good old days are gone, and what we have today is Ted Cruz and John Boehner in lieu of people whose political footfalls shook the nation.  They are two men whose only goals are self-aggrandizement and political ascent whether they deserve it or not rather than service to the cause of further perfecting American society.  Cruz is just a clever fool who I think genuinely doesn't know it when he is lying.  But Boehner is craven and greedy for the limelight, and he knows what he is doing unlike Cruz who is basically a neophyte when it comes to national politics.  While Cruz may not know what he does, but Boehner knows full well.  The awful part of it is that both of them are what passes for great men today, and no one seems to be disturbed by that.  Both will be reelected, and Boehner may even get another term as Speaker of The House, though I doubt it.  Even the Republicans must know that they can do better.  And what's worst about all this is that we American voters have allowed this to be our fate.  It is disheartening because the decline in the quality of American politicians has resulted in an elevation of political maneuvering to the status of good governance, taking primacy over the political virtues we used to extol as a people.  The filibusterer gets the congratulations of his party and the denial of the right to vote yea or nay on legislation by parliamentary manipulation is exalted as astute politicking.  Form has taken over substance, and it is going to be terribly difficult to overcome that kind of moral and ethical decay because majority rule no longer seems to mean anything.  If we ever had a democracy, we don't have one anymore.  Mind you, none of those great men who are now so sorely missed was always right.  O'Neill did shut down the government more than once during the Carter administration for example over the issue of abortion, a subject on which he was ambivalent, but in the end as conservative as John Boehner is about Obamacare and the national debt.  Johnson escalated our commitment to the Vietnam War, all in a futile effort to save what turned out to be a disappointing indigenous political establishment in that country, and Clinton's contretemps are the Washington equivalents of Hollywood legends.  They made big mistakes because they tried to do big things.  Boehner's mistakes are petty, and what that says about him is just as unmistakable.

Your friend,

Mike