It's About Values

A Republican sympathizer commented (on Facebook) about my last blog entry, “You are much more interesting when you don't write about politics!”   So, I’m not going to write about politics this time.  I’m going to write about values. 

These are not mine:

    "I like being able to fire people who provide services to me."  

     “Let Detroit go bankrupt.”
     “We’ve always encouraged young people: Take a shot… get the education, borrow money if you have to from your parents, start a business.”
     "I'm also unemployed."
     "There were a couple of times I wondered whether I was going to get a pink slip."  Seriously?
     "I get speaker's fees from time to time, but not very much."  But, golly, put it in a little tin box and it adds up to $374,000 in one year!
     “Well, there are 47% of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. … These are people who pay no income tax.”
       "I'm not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there."

All from the mouth of one man. 

But this isn’t about one man, it’s about values. 

When Republicans were wise and reasonable, President Dwight Eisenhower, said, “A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.”  I knew some day I’d find a reason to like Ike.  I found two.  In a 1954 letter to his brother Edgar, he wrote, “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.  There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. … Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”  

All right, it is about one man.

     “Free enterprise has done more to lift people out of poverty, to help build a strong middle class, to help educate our kids, and to make our lives better than all the programs of government combined.”

     “There are 47%... who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they're entitled to healthcare, to food, to housing, to you name it. … And the government should give it to them. …
     “My job is not to worry about those people.  I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.
     “And they will vote for this president no matter what.” 

Which brings us back to values.  What would Ike have had to say about his or any political  party’s schemes to deny the right to vote to those, primarily minorities, deemed likely to vote for another party’s candidate(s)?  About one political body’s obsessive campaign to prohibit and criminalize a woman’s right to make decisions governing her own body?  About a treacherous cabal of an opposition  party’s elected representatives plotting, the night before a new president’s first day in office, to obstruct and quash his ability, hence the entire government’s ability, to accomplish anything for four years?  Sound extreme?  It’s a matter of record: a party that represents roughly half of Americans, and would like, at any cost, to represent all, swore, on the night before the president took office, to oppose every single thing the president did or wanted—in sum, to see to it that he failed.  Whose Senate leader said, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” The single most important thing!  What about the people’s elected  representatives’ duty to make laws?  To regulate interstate commerce?  To coin money and collect taxes?  To “provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States?”  To honor and uphold Article 1 of The Constitution of the United States!  Values!  In the gutter.

And the candidate?—the standard-bearer of “the single most important thing…”?  He doesn’t stand for anything—

     "I'm not familiar precisely with what I said, but I'll stand by what I said, whatever it was."

—and a man who doesn’t stand for anything will perversely stand for anything under the sun, no matter how base and unprincipled, if that will get him what he wants.  He is an empty vessel, wide open to being indiscriminately filled and emptied and refilled ad infinitum by anything or anybody with an agenda, at whim or will.  

Since this is about values, and one of mine is making an effort to present a balanced argument  whenever possible, I’ll let a Republican have the last word.  Writing for “Politico.com,” Joe Scarborough, former congressman and current host of TV’s “The Scarborough Report,” had this to say:

“Mitt Romney is in trouble. Not because of a boring convention or a bloodless speech or a grossly inappropriate press conference, but rather because the man refuses to stick his neck out and take a stand on the critical issues of our time. … And the lesson is clear: If we want to win the battle of ideas in the long term, we should be willing to face the fact that Mitt Romney is likely to lose—and should, given that he’s neither a true conservative nor a courageous moderate. He’s just an ambitious man.”

RX: John Roberts

The headlines are fast and furious-making, the engine of government careening further right… HOLDER HELD IN CONTEMPT… CITIZENS UNITED TRUMPS STATE LAW… BOEHNER SAYS HEALTH CARE LAW HURTING ECONOMY… (a big Boehner for the GOP!) …and suddenly, an abrupt turn to the left… SUPREME COURT UPHOLDS HEALTH CARE LAW and THE MANDATE CAN STAY! and ROBERTS SAVES OBAMACARE and… Whoa!  Chief justice John Roberts, the prescription for the Affordable Health Care Act?… for the country’s toxic  political malaise?… for what ails the Democratic Party?  Capital!

This is the same man who made two trips to Tallahassee, Fla., in November 2000 during the hotly contested presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore to assist lawyers working on behalf of Bush, to be subsequently appointed by Bush to the Supreme Court as its chief justice.  The man who, as a lawyer for the Reagan administration, wrote legal memos defending administration policies on abortion, and as a lawyer in the George H. W. Bush administration, signed a legal brief urging the court to overturn Roe v. Wade.  And it is the Roberts’ court, very much the Roberts’ court at this point, that twice voted in favor of upholding the Citizens United case, effectively characterized by President Obama in his 2010 State of the Union Address, as having “reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests… to spend without limit in our elections.”  This is a very conservative man.  What got into him today?

Many bewildered conservatives are saying the Democrats got to him.  Nonsense.  A few legal experts see his action as a reaction to the excessive perception of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s heralded power as the swing vote.  Unlikely.  Some pundits suggest that by swinging left on such a momentous decision, he is gathering the political capital to tack further right again during the court’s next term, when it predictably may face a host of contentious issues doubtfully limited to affirmative action, gay marriage and voting rights.  But what if Roberts, calculatedly clever, is seeking to keep all his options for the future open, or, abundantly adroit, is even edging to the left?  He might turn into one of jurisprudence’s most nimble broken field runners.  Far-fetched?  Not if you consider the unexpected changes of heart and politics of a number of his court predecessors,  justices David Souter and Harry Blackman, and chief justice Earl Warren,  nominated respectively by Republican presidents George H.W. Bush, Nixon and Eisenhower.  

During his Senate confirmation hearings, Roberts likened the role as a judge to one of a baseball umpire whose "job is to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat."  With seven years on the court and perhaps a quarter-century or more to go, he can’t help but have his legacy and place in history in mind.  A relatively young man with lifetime tenure on arguably the most esteemed body of jurists in the world, it’s his court to save or let sink, and I believe he was astute enough not to let it sink any lower than it has, not, at least, in the eyes of a mere 44% of Americans who still approve of it according to a New York Times-CBS News poll published three weeks ago.  He looked for a way to do what he did.  Constitutionally predisposed to finding acts of Congress constitutional—he is on record stating, “we have a duty to construe a statute to save it, if fairly possible”—he found a way.

On a personal note, since I became aware of Judge John Roberts, I have held he’s really Tom Hanks, and we all know Tom Hanks would go to the ends of the earth, and beyond, for the Affordable Care Act!  That consideration aired and dismissed, my guess is that the chief justice, a learned, contemplative man, is conceivably appalled by the nasty, loony, irrational behavior of the extremists in control of the Republican party, and fearful of the future that foretells for the country—just doesn’t want to see Mitt Romney as its president.

A Night at the Oscars for Politicians

Taking advantage of the piddling input I have with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, I’m proposing a new category for the Oscars: Best Performance by a Politician.

Since that dynamic-duo accounting firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers, must receive the voters’ final ballots by the Tuesday before “Oscar Sunday,” it’s too late for the 2012 awards, but not too late to propose deserving candidates.

The run-up to the “Best Performance” honors in this new category featured a field of some pretty fair contenders who zoomed in and faded out—with a BANG...

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, whose artless response to President Obama's 2009 State of the Union address all but made King George VI’s speech impediment in “The King’s Speech” look like plagiarism. Rep. Charles B. Rangel of New York, who earned a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star for his valor during the Korean War, and a “Scarlet Letter” from the House Ethics Committee six decades later on being found guilty of only 11 charges of ethics violations (out of 12)… but refused to resign—bang!—after a trial determined his means could not be reconciled with his ways. Michele Bachmann for her embodiment of every space-kook, from “My Friend Irma” through “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” to “Clueless,” who ever stumbled across the silver screen. And John Edwards and Herman Cain and [your write-in here] who went out with a bang!

...or a whimper:

Anthony Wiener, the poster boy for optimum exposure at flexed shutter speed. John Boehner, who stunned us with his gift for turning on the tears—and concealing the ice in his veins… a neat trick! Rod Blagojevich, the first impeached governor of Illinois!, whose “irreconcilable artistic differences” with the law led to a sentence of 14 years in federal prison. And Rick Perry—the snap, crackle and stupendous fizzle of 21st century politics’ “big picture.”

Plus those serenity-sapping character “actors” who just won’t go away:

Donald Trump, for his unforgettable portrayal of a bigger blustering buffoon than the bankably boorish Donald Trump. Sarah Palin, for her debut performance as a political has-been. Joseph Lieberman, who says he’s going away, but how far?

Let’s CUT TO the award: Best Performance by a Politician. In light of the primaries and caucuses, the Republicans have had the field pretty much to themselves, although they insist on sharing it with President Obama, a gift for the Democrats that doesn’t stop giving. Kind of like an actress, any actress, supplicating Meryl Streep to join her for anything anywhere. (A lucky thing for politicians of every stripe that Streep would rather play one than be one.)

DISSOLVE TO a three-ring circus and a side show. WE PAN the nominees:

Rick Santorum (“Crouching Kitten, Hidden Dragon”) for his memorable performance as a draconian chauvinist who’d rather be extremely right than president. Mitt Romney (“The Year of Living Dishonestly”) for overcoming type-casting with his disturbing portrayal of a multiple choice personality who’d rather be “severely conservative” than moderately truthful. Newt Gingrich (“The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Also-Ran”) for his effortless emulation of all ten principal characters in “The Wizard of Oz.” And Ron Paul (“A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Convention”), unremitting in search of a meaningful role.
I propose that anyone voting for a candidate in this category be required to show a home-state issued Voter ID card. Credit cards will not be acceptable, particularly Platinum ones. Driver’s licenses won’t do. Vehicle Registration cards—negotiable, but since we’re talking Hollywood here, no vehicles older than last year’s. What’s that, Mitt? All right, this year’s.

Down for the Count of Nine

You can’t keep a good country down. And say what you will about The United States of America, it’s a good country. I don’t have to give you reasons—in your blood and in your bones, in your fiber and your core, you know them. Malcontents and dissidents, progressives and libertarians, etiologists, animists and even bloggers know them.

So, we’re on the ropes and our inevitability buckles, we sag and we drop… down, but not out, never out. We take the count of nine and, somehow, the spring comes back to our psyches and we start punching back.

Six days ago, The Labor Department reported that the U.S. unemployment rate had fallen to 8.3 percent, a noteworthy return to the level of President Obama’s first full month in office after climbing to a high of 10 percent in late 2009—and 243,000 jobs were added in January at the fastest pace in the last nine months. Add to that good news that the jobs market had larger gains in earlier months than previously reported and the economy has been gaining strength for almost six months. And it doesn’t stop there: “Over the last year, the economy has added almost two million jobs for the best twelve months in five years. Stocks surged, with the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index closing only slightly below its high since Mr. Obama took office” and the Dow Jones Industrial average at its highest since May 19, 2008, eight months before the president took office.

You’d think that such positive news would be welcome, wouldn’t you? Why am I even asking? Because we have those among us who don’t want the country to succeed, not if a president not of their party gets any credit. Whom do you imagine would greet such good tidings with such crepe-hanging prose?, like: “This recovery has been slower than it should have been. People have been suffering for longer than they should have had to suffer. Will it get better? I think it’ll get better. But this president has not helped the process. He’s hurt it.” Does that help "the process"?

The sour grapes comes from Mitt Romney, who, to paraphrase Henry Clay, would rather be right to be president—as far right as Republican voters will buy, it’s fair to add. Romney, and Clay, who preceded him by almost two centuries, make an interesting comparison. Clay was nicknamed "The Great Compromiser." Flip-flop didn’t enter the American lexicon until 1944, three years before Romney was born. Clay was a candidate for president three times on three different “Republican” tickets, and failed. Romney, as we know, is on his second run, but doesn’t seem inclined to take no for an answer, not even by practically everyone in his own party. Clay was a dedicated conservative of his time. Romney is a chameleon, all the time.

In lieu of roaring back, our economy may only be purring back, but it’s pure catnip, not partisan fodder, for those hurting the most. We the People feed on optimism. And optimism feeds on itself. Any sports fan, any prayer fan, any romantic (for Cupid’s sake!), can tell you that.

Can a $26 billion settlement with five of the nation’s largest banks and a hoped-for value that would stretch to 39 million and nine additional major mortgage servicers, having the potential to provide relief to nearly two million current and former homeowners, be bad? Even flawed and in flux, bad? I give it 24 hours before the first bellyacher grouses.

In high school, I had a mentor, an inspiring English professor we used to call Uncle Joe. To this day, I think about a lecture wherein he contended that the key to the success of American pilots during World War Two was their unfailing sense of humor. The impact of his insight is reinforced every time I see a movie with the actor-pilots bantering wittily while exploding flak threatens to bring them and their planes down from the skies. I see an overkill of flak emanating from Capitol Hill and the campaign trail threatening to bring down the electorate, but a woeful dearth of wit or humor to elevate or stir. Fortunately, you can’t keep a good country down.

A Liberal Theory of Relativity

The Yankees are winning games, so I don’t care if the Celtics are. While oil keeps spilling into the Gulf, I can be patient with our super’s inability to staunch the water trickling through my toilet bowl. As long as people of all faiths respect what the Jewish people continue to contribute to the arts and sciences (and belt an occasional show tune), they can judge us all they want. Everything’s relative.

“In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king,” goes the proverb. Maybe my new eyeglasses have something to do with it. Maybe it’s that my grandson has started losing his teeth and I’m not losing mine! I have perspective.

I know to eschew the Yankees v. Phillies and Celtics v. Lakers long enough to hear my president address the country about the oil spill. Setting myself apart from 51% of the country, I know I can listen, respectfully and objectively, to what he has to say.

I’m prepared for him to begin by stating “our nation faces a multitude of challenges,” and to enumerate, “At home… to recover and rebuild from a recession…” and “Abroad… taking the fight to al Qaeda wherever it exists.” I do a perspective check for “wherever it exists.” I have it in my rear-view mirror.

We get to the big challenge: “Because there has never been a leak of this size at this depth, stopping it has tested the limits of human technology.” And the limitations of human beings!, I want to add, but there’s no time—the president is “multituding” the challenges: “…just after the rig sank, I assembled a team of our nation's best scientists and engineers to tackle this challenge.” I’m ready and waiting with perspective on this one. Much as I wouldn’t wish any ill spill on President Obama, far better it happened on his watch than his predecessor’s, so that W’s VP couldn’t assemble “a team of our nation's best scientists and engineers” from BP “to tackle this challenge.”

It didn’t take long for President Obama to provide the undeniable perspective, vividly. With one word: epidemic. “The millions of gallons of oil that have spilled into the Gulf of Mexico are more like an epidemic, one that we will be fighting for months and even years.”

I listen and learn that “30,000 personnel… are working across four states.” Jobs, I think. “Thousands of ships and other vessels are responding.” Heartening, I think, but am relieved that a flotilla from Turkey is not among them.

It’s nigh onto the fourth inning at Yankee Stadium, I’m guessing, when the president says, “…if something isn't working, we want to hear about it,” and I know he isn’t thinking of my toilet.

Peace for Peace

The United States and Israel at odds? Nah, can’t be. Must be for show, a tactical maneuver, a game-changing strategy. Right?

Either that or The President of the United States and his administration are making a bigger blunder than the Prime Minister of Israel and his cabinet.

Facts first. While the United States is promoting “proximity talks,” indirect negotiations between the Palestinian Authority and the government of Israel; while the White House expects Israel, as a unilateral trust-building gesture, to maintain a total freeze on settlement construction in East Jerusalem (with a partial freeze in the West Bank); while Vice-President Biden is visiting Israel: the coalition government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announces eventual plans to build 1,600 new homes in an East Jerusalem settlement, Ramat Shlomo. Biden is offended, says so and returns home. George Mitchell, the U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, cancels his trip and stays home. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, are, if you know your Casablanca, “shocked… shocked.”

And President Obama, emboldened by victory after what still seems like the Thirty Years Health Care War, feeling and showing his oats, starts swaggering in the wrong direction. What is it about prioritizing that eludes him? If he wants to talk tough, he ought to be unleashing his rich rhetoric and efficacious tones on Iran or North Korea or Afghanistan’s Karzai. The Jews in his administration, all of whom must know better, should talk tachlis (“brass tacks”) to him and tell him he won’t beat little Israel into submission. It is written—in stone: David doesn’t yield to Goliath.

Let’s set aside for the moment the biblical claim to the Land of Israel, and consider the land Israel acquired in 1967 from the Six Day War after being invaded by the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon while Egypt’s President Gamal Nasser boasted, “…standing behind us are the armies of Iraq, Algeria, Kuwait, Sudan and the whole Arab nation.” If someone drove a tank into your life with the stated intent of wiping you and your family “off the face of the map,” [President Aref of Iraq], what would you be inclined to give back—as much as one rock hurled at the heads of your children? “To the victor belong the spoils” is not only a U.S. Senator’s coinage, but also exclusively a western concept in the eyes of the eastern world… when the victor is western. Now add to that the biblical claim.

So what do these intransigent Israelis want? Peace. What are they entitled to? Peace, as in freedom from attack. Peace not for land or 250 imprisoned terrorists in exchange for one captured Israeli soldier or his remains. Peace for Peace. This is what both sides, the State of Israel and the Palestinian Authority, should be asking for, demanding, agreeing to exchange and genuinely exchanging. Peace for Peace. Written in stone.

Frankly, I don’t care for Netanyahu—didn’t when I met him shortly after he came to the U.S. to join Israel's diplomatic mission here and found no reason to like him any better when, several years later, he became Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations. Israel’s 9th Prime Minister from 1996 to 1999, he’s not the man I wanted for Prime Minister in 2009. The man I wanted is a woman, Tsipy Livni, despite her questionable claim, “…we need to give up parts of the Land of Israel.” My reservations stated, I give Netanyahu this: he’s as qualified to lead a nation as any other world leader I can think of, and far more qualified than most of them. Resolute under pressure, and eloquent in a recent address, he gets the last word today.

After citing solid evidence of a significant Jewish presence in Jerusalem and the Land of Israel 4,000 years ago, he went on to say:

“Ladies and Gentleman, the connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel cannot be denied. The connection between the Jewish people and Jerusalem cannot be denied. The Jewish people were building Jerusalem 3,000 years ago and the Jewish people are building Jerusalem today. Jerusalem is not a settlement, it’s our capitol.”

To be continued…

"A Victory For Common Sense"

The news is health care. We look better to the world than we do to ourselves. America, the beautiful from afar, one nation divisible within. E pluribus unum, in plain English, is not “out of many, one,” but—united we swagger, divided we sprawl. We are noble in spite of half of us.

We join tiny Luxembourg, Cyprus, Iceland, and 33 vastly larger countries in having health care we can believe in. The first to have national health care was Norway in 1912, the most recent, Israel in 1995. It took nearly one hundred years for us to enter the 20th century.

“A victory for common sense,” our president proclaimed, it is the inexorable march of time. The Social Security Act became law in 1935. It survived two challenges to its constitutionality in the Supreme Court. Medicare went into effect in 1965. Seeking to squelch it four years earlier, Ronald Reagan said, “If you don't do this and I don't do it, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free.” On March 21, 2010, the House of Representatives passed “H.R. 3590 The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” aka “The Health Care Reform Bill” by a vote of 219-212.

What so proudly we hail is merely doing what is right, what is civilized, what is compassionate. It is reform long overdue. It is goodwill, majestic and monumental. And, without doubt, it is historic. Future Pete Seegers and Bruce Springsteens of the world will sing about it. This is what “you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children.”

I’m not celebrating yet. I can’t raise a glass and drink to “Change” while roughly half of Congress and half the country see their glass as half empty—only now, after having drunk so deeply from its bounty for so long. I can’t applaud leveling the playing field while unruly bullies stomp their feet and scream and do everything they can to break up the game unless they can have their way. Can’t cheer until I can sit them down and say, “Calm down… calm down… that’s it… no, now calm down… take a deep breath… shh, calm... that’s it… breathe… breathe… now say you’re sorry for telling people who didn’t do anything to you, “I wish you were dead.”

The shabby slings and arrows of the Right should be history, as in passé. They tried everything: “death panels” and “granny killing,” “socialism” and “Naziism,” in desperation, spit and slurs. When they didn’t work, they couldn’t wait even a day to get even uglier. Now it’s bricks and guns. Worse, death threats to the children of legislators who supported the reform bill!

In the spirit of never say die—unless lying or threatening—Republicans cite that 34 Democrats voted against the bill is an argument for their side. I see it differently: that 34 Democrats voted against it shows a party with 34 members who voted their consciences or on principle. Let me spell that for them—principle, not principal. Although not a single Republican broke rank and voted anything but no, it still doesn’t seem to occur to them that while they indiscriminately hurl slurs of Naziism at anyone who opposes them, they are the ones who march in lockstep.

They like those isms. An apparent disciple, vw5Ohguy, twittered:

With passage of the wealth redistribution plan...er, I mean Health care "reform", we just took a giant jack-booted step towards socialism.

This is not what President Obama had in mind when he said, “This is what change looks like.”

Jobs We Can Believe In

The landscape is bleak. We see a progression of crumbling bridges, collapsing dams, breached levees, decaying roads and desiccated farmlands. Stagnant water, wastewater, solid waste, hazardous waste. Dissolve to: abandoned homes, withering parks, collapsing schools, broken rails.

Sound like a depressing movie you don’t want to see? Neither do I. It’s no movie, it’s America. It isn’t over in two hours and you can’t walk out on it.

We have been looking at America’s vexing infrastructure—from afar and for far too long—and missing the blighted forest for the illusory trees. Ready for your close-up, America? We need a new New Deal. Yes, New Deal—the dirty words Republicans would be titillated to hear and Democrats are afraid to say even under their breath.

Accepting the Democratic nomination for the presidency (July 2, 1932), Franklin Delano Roosevelt mentioned a New Deal for the American people for the first time. While depression-struck Americans in soup lines blamed their suffering on an alphabet soup of villains they identified as the three Bs—brokers, bankers, and businessmen, FDR set his sights on what he defined as the three Rs—relief, recovery and reform, the latter to alter and improve the financial system to preclude another economic collapse. He took to the radio to talk to the American people—to allay their fears, to rebuild their confidence, to explain what went wrong and how it might be corrected. Heartened and assured by the president’s “fireside chats” as if he were speaking individually to every man, woman and child, a needy nation eagerly waited for and welcomed them. Worth noting: the New Deal and its programs, as The Library of Congress “Learning Page” points out, “set a precedent for the federal government to play a key role in the economic and social affairs of the nation.”

In his State of the Union speech just two weeks ago, President Obama cited “the times that tested the courage of our convictions…” Like the Great Depression. He continued, “And despite all our divisions and disagreements, our hesitations and our fears, America prevailed because we chose to move forward as one nation, as one people. Again, we are tested. And again, we must answer history's call.” He subsequently added, “…it's time the American people get a government that matches their decency; that embodies their strength. And tonight, tonight I'd like to talk about how together we can deliver on that promise. It begins with our economy.” The president pledged to make “a million jobs the overwhelming priority for the coming year.”

We are privileged, I would even say blessed, to have an educated, articulate man for president. So what does the opposition hear? House Republican leader John Boehner called the president’s goals “job-killing policies.” I quote Bertrand Russell: “A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.”

So, only yesterday, as the New York Times reported, President Obama and Republican leaders seemed to agree the two sides “might be able to work together [on] jobs creation.” But before you could say “brain-dead,” those “leaders” voted to block the president’s choice for the National Labor Relations Board. Labor, as in work! The same people who think Democratic is a three-syllable word ending with a “t” must think jobs and labor are antonyms, not synonyms.

Who could object to creating jobs, reducing unemployment and rebuilding America? We know who.

Maybe the solution to the Republicans' inability to grasp a thought as vital as this one is to write “jobs” on the palms of their hands.

America Forward

I hate to kick a man when he’s up. The president’s State of the Union speech last night was exhilarating and touching. But…

This is what I was thinking before the speech:

What are they waiting for? Has the White House made all who enter tone deaf? The American people are screaming “jobs!” and the Democrats are only hearing “health care.” The people are imploring, “Talk to me!” and the president is scolding bankers and brokers. Americans are chanting “Now!” and Obama, Axelrod et al still have campaign huzzahs and hoopla ringing in their ears.

And why isn’t Rahm Emanuel screaming… anything?! (I’m listening for “Where’s the exit?”)

Now that I’ve heard the speech, my thoughts are:

If the race is not to the swift, is it to the slow to come around? I can’t see why not.

Clearly, President Obama was late coming out of the gate—so phlegmatically dilatory he had his visionary PACs shaking their heads and chomping at the bit to hedge their bets. That was going into the first turn. As all the front-runners he’s left in the dust know from the gritty taste in their mouths, Barack Obama’s a capital closer.

The real Barack Obama stood up last night. Stood up for the people who cling to their faith in his ability and resolve to make a difference. Stood up to the Party of No, the Supreme Court, and his own recalcitrant party.

Now that he’s spoken out, I know what he’s waiting for. For people to come to their senses. He can talk about listening to people in Elkhart, Indiana or Elyria, Ohio, but I believe he’s waiting for someone like the sobbing woman at an Arkansas town meeting who wants her America back to sober up and figure out what her America is or ever was. And waiting for many more like her.

Barack Obama is waiting, patiently, because Barack Obama is first and foremost, is and always will be what he supremely was, a community organizer. Not to recognize and grasp it is not to understand him. He learned how to bring people together and accomplish the seemingly impossible with little or usually no resources other than his own, namely, his brain, his soul and his remarkably indefatigable will. In Dreams of My Father, he tells of organizing a protest to present the problems and living conditions of people from a poverty- and crime-stricken Chicago slum to a Chicago municipal authority. Lacking faith in a system that had all but abandoned them, only two or three people from the neighborhood showed up to board the bus Obama has arranged, not easily, for the trip to downtown Chicago. Refusing to let it end there, he went around the neighborhood rounding up people, more than enough, to make a good showing. Wednesday night, he wasn’t exaggerating when he said, “I don’t quit.” He doesn’t.

I don’t want my America back, I want my America forward. My belief that my chosen president wants the same thing is restored. In my previous entry, I said, “I still believe in him. I have no choice.” Now I say: choice or otherwise, I believe in him.