The Party of Lincoln Needs To Look In The MirrorBy Michael Stafford | June 15th, 2011 | 333 Comments
Earlier this year, a tape of NPR’s head fundraiser, Ron Schiller, making remarks critical of the GOP and the Tea Party surfaced. In the tape, Schiller referred to the Republican Party as “anti-intellectual” and described the Tea Party as “racist,” “Islamophobic,” and “xenophobic.” He went on to opine that “Jews” control America’s major newspapers.
Schiller’s bizarre and conspiratorial anti-Semitic remarks are disturbing and offensive. His remarks about the GOP and the Tea Party, though, warrant further analysis for a simple reason: they are perceptions widely shared in our society.
Conservatives reacted to Schiller’s comments with anger. In their eyes, it was just one more example of a liberal establishment standing ever ready to portray Republicans and conservatives as ignorant racists and bigots.
More: http://blog.cagle.com/2011/06/the-party-of-lincoln-needs-to-look-in-the-mirror/
When I was young, the GOP had a moderate Northeastern wing that counted Dwight Eisenhower and Nelson Rockefeller in its ranks. As the party's power base moved to the right, and to the West, it remained a great party for awhile. I voted twice for Reagan and am proud of those votes. I believe he and Thatcher and Pope together did much to bring the Soviet Union to a much earlier demise than would otherwise have happened.
In 2008 with, with an inexperienced former Illinois legislator emerging as the Democrat's presidential candidate, I thought I saw a glint of that former greatness in John McCain. I was briefly registered as a Republican for the first time in my life, in hopes of voting for him in the primary. But then came his impetuous, cynical selection of Sarah Palin. And I was out of his camp... and perhaps lost to the GOP for good.
Below are some of the pieces I wrote in my then-newspaper column, which reflect my evolution from a McCain enthusiast to an Obama supporter:
Can you see her? Judy Garland in her red shoes, clicking her heels and repeating the mantra: “There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.” Voila! She wakes up in her very own little bed in her very own little shack out on her very own little Kansas farm, surrounded by family and farm hands, all safe and sound. Kitsch doesn’t get any more All-American than that.
What would happen, do you think, if John McCain clicked his heels together and mumbled, “There’s no place like home”? Apparently he might wake up in any one of about eight different places. I’ll bet none of the eight is located in Kansas.
Obama hopes to make political hay out of McCain’s inability to remember exactly how many houses he has. This is reminiscent of the elder George Bush’s expression of amazement about bar codes in a local supermarket during the 1992 campaign. Both gaffs make the candidate seem out of touch.
Obama boasts of having only one home. He hasn’t mentioned that his crib set him back a reported $1.65 million. That amount just about equaled the Obamas’ combined income for the year they made the purchase. The Chicago Tribune reported in November 2006, “They were drawn to a 96-year-old Georgian revival home that has four fireplaces, glass-door bookcases fashioned from Honduran mahogany, and a 1,000-bottle wine cellar, according to real estate listings and an interview.”
Obama’s book deals and his wife’s $300,000 a year vice presidency with Chicago University Hospitals together accounted for their seven-figure gross annual income.
Well, heck, Olympian Mike Phelps is expected to gross $30 million in product endorsements during the year ahead. So what’s the big deal about Obama and spouse pulling down $1.67 mil? Phelps no doubt will start accumulating real estate, too.
Meanwhile, he’s taking some heat for adding Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes to his list of clients. Writes one web pundit, “The deal has earned Phelps harsh criticism from some doctors, such as nutritionist Rebecca Solomon of Mount Sanai Medical Center. In a Daily News article posted this morning, Solomon said, ‘I would not consider Frosted Flakes the food of an Olympian.’ That's the understatement of the day. I would consider Frosted Flakes to be the food of a generation of obese, diabetic, ADHD kids who need real role models they can follow, not sellout junk food promoters who trade fame for unethical profits.” (http://www.naturalnews.com/023914.html)
This guy’s rap on fatties reminds me of the last time McCain got into trouble, but not for anything he said. A McCain advisor, Phil Gramm, created the flap by calling America “a nation of whiners.” Well, sorry folks, but I tend to agree that the overweight whiner has become an American archetype. If the shoe fits (and the pants don’t), I say wear it.
But let’s stop whining for a minute here and take a reality break. McCain is rich. Obama is rich. Even a kid, whose only apparent distinction is the ability to move from one end of a swimming pool to the other faster than anybody else, is rich. If you’re rich, too, then more power to you.
The simple truth is, ain’t no poor folks likely to run for president, or senator, or most any other important post. The last poor president, I guess, was Harry Truman. As a sitting U.S. Senator seeking reelection, Truman sometimes slept in his car while on the campaign trail. Once upon a time he had gone bankrupt. When his term in the White House was over, he and wife Bess moved back to the home in Independence Missouri that they had shared for years with her mother.
They just don’t make ‘em like old Harry any more, folks. Senator Obama may play the “poor mouth” card against Senator McCain, but in reality his feet are just as firmly planted on the Yellow Brick Road as are his opponent’s.
Posted by: Dr. James Ottavio Castagnera | August 23, 2008 at 02:57 AM
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Jim Castagnera: The Importance of Character
SOURCE: Carbon County (PA) Times-News (10-4-08)
[Jim Castagnera is the Associate Provost/Associate Counsel at Rider University. A collection of his columns is available at www.lulu.com.]
I have expressed more than once in this space my reluctance to vote for Barack Obama, because of his inexperience. John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate complicates the choice for me, since McCain, age 72 and a cancer survivor, might not make it through even a first term. The carping back and forth between Obama and Palin partisans, about which of them is less prepared for the presidency, only underlined the inescapable fact that they are both neophytes on the world stage.
This week I re-read David McCullough’s 1992 biography of Harry Truman. The book reminded me that character sometimes trumps experience as a criterion for national leadership. If any president had character in spades, that president was Harry Truman. His biography also reminded me of how little experience Truman brought to almost every new challenge of his career.
When he was elected the lieutenant of his artillery battery and, subsequently promoted to captain, led that battery through some hot action during the 1919 Battle of the Argonne, he rose to that challenge from a background spent almost exclusively down on the family farm. A few years in Missouri’s National Guard marked his only prior military experience. Prior to participating in this great WWI battle, as McCullough says in an essay called “Character Above All,” Truman “had never been in a fight in his life. He was the little boy forbidden by his mother to play in roughhouse games because of his glasses. He was a bookworm --- a sissy, as he said himself later on, using the dreaded word.”
After the war, he and an Army buddy started a men’s wear shop that went bankrupt. Only then did Harry enter politics, running for election to a modest county judgeship. Although put forward by the notorious “Pendergast Machine,” he conducted himself honorably, later stating that he passed up the chance to line his pockets to the tune of a million or more dollars in construction contracts. Remarkably, instead of dumping Truman for refusing to play along, the political bosses later put him up for the U.S. Senate.
Elected to Congress for the first time during the New Deal, Truman arrived in Washington tarred with the Pendergast brush. Some Senate colleagues, according to McCullough, refused to speak to the junior Senator from Missouri. Harry Truman won them over through straight talk and hard work. Still, when he ran for reelection, most observers inside and outside the Senate wrote him off. With few influential friends and little money, he barnstormed his state, sometimes sleeping in his car. A combination of Truman pluck and sheer luck --- his two primary opponents split the anti-Pendergast vote --- returned him to the Senate in 1940.
During this second Senatorial term, Truman came of age in national politics. The Truman Committee, his personal brainstorm, became the Congressional watchdog of wartime spending, arguably saving Uncle Sam billions of dollars by ferreting out waste and graft in defense contracts. Truman’s face landed on the cover of Time Magazine for the first time.
In 1944 Senator Harry Truman became “the Missouri Compromise” at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. After playing coy about his choice for a running mate for his fourth term, FDR dumped incumbent VP Henry Wallace and passed over other leading contenders for the slot in favor of the inoffensive Truman. Truman was vice president for only 82 days, when FDR died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage.
As he had always been disparaged, his ascendancy to the presidency was no exception. Critics --- and there were many --- considered him a nobody, a lightweight. Truman himself said, “I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me.” No wonder: one of his first decisions was to drop the atom bomb on Japan.
He went on to lead America into the Marshall Plan, probably the most important step in saving Western Europe from Soviet domination, and perhaps the only time in history when the victor lifted the vanquished off their knees. His reelection in 1948 was another instance of Truman pluck overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds. The famous photo of a victorious Harry, holding aloft the Chicago Tribune’s headline “Dewey Defeats Truman,” says it all.
As McCullough sums it up, “He was not without flaw…. [but] Principle mattered more than his own political hide. His courage was the courage of his convictions….” The question for November 2008 is: who among the candidates can make a similar claim? If I knew the answer to that, I’d know who should have my vote.
Posted On: Sunday, September 28, 2008 - 19:12
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Why will I vote for Obama, when I have said so often that I would not?
First and foremost, because John McCain has let me --- and such GOP icons as Christopher Buckley and Colin Powell --- down… way down. It’s not that he is behaving like Hubert Humphrey in ’68, when Gonzo-journalist Hunter Thomson likened HHH to a bull moose in heat crashing through a Wisconsin forest. Old men may be forgiven for excessive zeal in their last runs for the White House.
No, I could forgive him for that. What I can’t forgive is his selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate. Palin makes Obama look like an elder statesman. Her nomination is an insult to every thinking American. True, P.T. Barnum once said, “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.” But, folks, are we really that dumb? I sure hope not. But, if I were sure we weren’t, I wouldn’t be worrying about the unthinkable.
Second, whether Obama is good or merely mediocre in the White House, his election will do more to put behind us the centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation, than anything else that I can imagine. His presidency simultaneously will send a conciliatory message to what we used to refer to as the “Third World.” From the Bush Doctrine to the son of a black African in one election… what opportunities to rebuild America’s international image this offers!
Last, but not least, something in my aging gut tells me this guy may be the real deal, despite his limited international expertise. His aplomb in the three debates was exemplary. Hilary Clinton had me worrying about the crisis-call at three o’clock in the morning. I begin to believe that that call, when it comes (as it inevitably must), won’t shake this guy up at all. Besides, he has the good sense to surround himself with the best and the brightest, from Joe Biden to Warren Buffet.
So, I say to the Secret Service: be on your tippy toes, folks. Keep this candidate safe. He may be America’s Great Black Hope. In any event, he deserves a chance to change the course of our ship of state, which Mr. Bush has driven over shoals, nearly tearing out its bottom, and headed toward history’s rocks. Keep him safe and sound, fellas. I have come to believe that right now we need this guy.
Posted On: Sunday, October 26, 2008
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