Riding off into the political sunset

Their friendship goes back to when the father was president and he was asked to drop off a set of car keys for his son, home on break from college. For more than 10 years, these two have been joined at the hip politically and ideologically. They also forged a close friendship.

Karl Rove is riding off into the political sunset, after being, arguably, the brains of the Republican Party for the past decade and possibly longer. Certainly, Rove was the man behind the curtain, the veritable Wizard of Oz, orchestrating the political strategies and machinations of a party that rolled over Democrats with ease.

Not in modern memory has a political operative yielded the power and successfully waged ideological warfare like Rove. During the reign of George W. Bush, there have been few, if any, more controversial and polarizing Republicans than Rove.

The Rove/Bush team first teamed up during George W’s unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate, in 1978. Bush, the younger, then just graduated from Harvard Business School, was finding his way, politically. He lost to Kent Hance by 6,000 votes and off he went to Harken Energy, to try his hand (unsuccessfully) in the oil business.

In 1993, Rove became Bush 43’s advisor, on his first run for governor of Texas. Utilizing push polls and other controversial tactics, such as implying that her administration was riddled with homosexuality, Rove helped engineer the Bush upset of Democratic incumbent, Ann Richards. The Rove/Bush juggernaut was just getting warmed up.

In 1998, Rove was in the advisors seat, as Dubya won reelection as Texas governor.

Come 2000, it was Rove at the controls, running the Bush campaign for president. During the bitterly contested Republican primary, in South Carolina, it was alleged that Rove was behind the racist innuendo and push polling conducted against major Bush rival, John McCain. Utilizing the question, “Would you be more likely, or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he fathered an illegitimate black child?” There were also insinuations against McCain that he ratted out his fellow prisoners of war, while in captivity in Hanoi. Rove, if nothing else, was the master of these kind of slash and burn tactics and they served the strengthening Bush machine very well. Later, it was Rove who was the ringleader of the Republican mobilization on the ground in Florida, overseeing the recount in this hotly contested race between Bush and Al Gore. For his efforts and loyalty, Rove became Bush 43’s senior advisor.

Rove’s quest for power, however, may have been his ultimate undoing. While the damage from his political wake will be hard to undo and there are some who argue that it may be nearly impossible, Rove overreached his role in 2003, when it is alleged that he leaked the identity of CIA employee, Valarie Plame. While never substantiated, the modus operandi of “leak and run” fit Rove like a glove.

By 2006, the Rove political magic seemed to have left his fingers, when Democrats won control of both houses, despite his insistence that his insider polling claimed otherwise. With this defeat, Republicans began carping about Rove and whether his role was still needed. Being political animals first, many, particularly those with presidential aspirations were ready to throw Rove under the bus, eager to distance themselves from the Bush presidency and the growing whiff of scandal and incompetency that had attached itself to the Bush/Rove backside, like a pesky boil.

President Bush, loyal to a fault, resisted calls to fire Rove. Yesterday, Rove himself decided it was time to go and in an interview published in the Wall Street Journal, announced he was resigning, effective August 31.

Rove plans to return to Texas, spend time with his family and he intimates that he’ll possibly write a book. He’ll certainly have no shortage of material for such a book.

Urban crusader under close scrutiny, after shootings in Newark

Can one person make a difference? In our current era of cynicism, the pervading sentiment inveighs against a belief that public service with a vision can change things. Political corruption, leaderless organizations and corporate kleptocracy have wrung idealism out of the national psyche.

In Newark, New Jersey, a former Rhodes scholar, who grew up far from the gutted streets and harsh realities of this urban wasteland is waging a valiant battle against entrenched crime, corruption and gangsters run amok. Cory Booker, who was elected mayor of Newark, in 2006, believes he can have a say in shaping the future of this city, riddled with drugs and crime, restoring hope for its residents. The $100,000 question now, seems to be, will his policies and efforts be given the chance to run their course and take root?

Newark, like Gary, Indiana, has been beset by a tide of issues that have contributed to its current state of chaos and disorder. While there is debate among various theories, certainly federal policies, like those instituted by the FHA, such as redlining, helped promote flight to the suburbs, eliminating the city’s economic underpinning, as both middle class blacks and whites departed en masse. Manufacturing, enticed by tax policies, fled to areas outside the city, eliminating jobs. The emphasis during the 1950s and 1960s on building interstates, helped fray the social fabric of neighborhoods in the city. It also made it easier for former residents to live outside the city, while continuing to commute into the urban center for work. Additionally, the city hitched its future to offers from the federal government to construct large public housing projects, financed at 100 percent with taxpayer dollars. Eventually, Newark had more public housing, per capita than any other U.S. city. All of these factors and others helped contribute to the downward spiral of the past 50 years in Newark.

Into this chaotic mix, stepped the idealistic Booker, fresh from Yale Law School. In 1997, he arrived in the city as a legal presence. Confronted by locals and challenged to move into the crime-ridden miasma of the inner city, Booker set up shop in a run-down public housing complex in the city’s Central Ward. What he witnessed was the hardships of his neighbors, rampant political corruption and a city that didn’t function at even the most basic levels, providing baseline services such as electricity and garbage pickup. This prompted Booker to take on a 16-year incumbent for a seat on the city council and Booker pulled off the upset. As a Democrat, it would seem obvious that Booker would be able to build alliances with other councilors on the Democratically-controlled council, but Booker found himself outvoted most times, 8-1, by a machine that cared little about its people and more about maintaining the status quo and its lucrative system of graft and kick-backs.

Unable to utilize the machinations of politics, Booker was forced to staging events and inviting the media. Booker also waged battles at the grassroots level, where he wasn't averse to crossing party lines and aligning with Republican businessmen, like Peter Denton. They co-founded an education reform group, E3, which advocated for schooling alternatives, such as charter schools and vouchers for inner-city schoolchildren. At the time, this was a controversial solution, particularly for a Democrat, like Booker, even more so because he was African-American. Despite Booker's efforts, he failed to rally the support from the city’s political establishment. In 2002, he ran for mayor, against Mayor Sharpe James, who had been lording over his own political fiefdom in Newark since 1986. Despite running an energetic campaign, focused on real change for Newark, Booker lost a close election to James, who waged a racially divisive campaign, even going as far as questioning Booker’s African-American pedigree and stooping to anti-Semetic rhetoric, claiming Booker was Jewish and insinuating that he is a homosexual. Such is politics in our current era.

In 2006, James’ reign of corruption finally was run off the tracks. Facing federal indictment and multiple charges of corruption and using city funds for personal gain, James chose not to square off against Booker. Booker’s opponent, Ronald Rice, who was a stand-in for James, was trounced soundly, with Booker garnering 73 percent of the votes cast for mayor.

It’s one thing to win an election; it’s another thing to govern. In a city where the out-of-wedlock birthrate is 70 percent, an unemployment rate double the U.S. average and social dysfunction the norm, Booker’s faced a daunting task since assuming the reigns of power. His win hasn't been without implications of danger. Just prior to taking office, a gang-orchestrated plot to assassinate Booker was uncovered and foiled. He has been under 24-hour surveillance since.

With its proximity to Manhattan (only 15 minutes away by train), a world class airport and a shipping port where most of the area’s goods pass through, Newark’s cheaper business lease rates comparable to New York and an abundance of housing, much of it in historically significant buildings would appear to be a magnet. However, the city’s reputation as a dangerous place keeps young professionals—the kind of tenants that could revitalize the city—away.

Unlike any current high profile politician that I’m aware of, Booker doesn’t just talk the talk. He’s ventured into known gang areas of the city, basketball in hand, and challenged local kids to pickup games on the city’s blacktop courts. Granted, it will take more than a jump shot and a quick first step off the dribble to stem the tide of violent crime—but the symbolic nature of this shouldn’t be discounted. Additionally, Booker has ordered higher than normal levels of police in some of the city’s most notorious areas of drug and gang activity.

Booker embarked on an overhaul of the entire police department, hiring Gerry McCarthy, from the NYPD, to be his top cop. McCarthy brought with him a reputation of being a valiant crusader against the drug trade, after waging a successful campaign to stem trafficking in Washington Heights, prior to coming to Newark. This appointment wasn’t without its critics, as McCarthy, who is viewed as an outsider and white, was thought to be incapable of running a police department in a city with a black majority. So is the state of race in America.

All of Booker’s efforts, however, may have been for naught, when on Saturday night, August 4th, four teenagers, weeks away from heading off to college, were shot, execution style, in a schoolyard in Newark.

The reaction of the community has been that of anger, demanding that Booker do something, as if one man can turn around decades of neglect and corruption, in a span of months.

Donna Jackson, who heads up and organization called, Take Back Our Streets, was quoted as saying that “Booker doesn’t deserve another second, another day, while our children are at stake.” So much for gratitude for Booker’s Herculean efforts. Maybe he would be better off taking his Yale law degree, find himself a lucrative corporate gig and forget about saving Newark’s ass. Or, he could go the route of higher profile politicians, the kind that end up running for president, who know little about the realities of places like Newark, Gary, Youngstown, or any other urban war zone.

[I'm grateful for Steven Malanga's excellent article in the Spring 2007 issue of City Journal, about Cory Booker and the city of Newark; Malanga's piece, along with interviews from NPR helped me to have a better sense of who Booker is and provided important background on this urban crusader.]

Hillary Clinton hails herself as a progressive

To listen to the political pundits, you would think that last night’s YouTube debate ushered in a new golden age of politics. Like everything else that get’s lumped in with technology and in particular, social networking sites like YouTube, it’s given a free pass and little or no scrutiny. Technology=good, or better, great, every time.

While some articles pointed out the paucity of substantive questions, most were willing to lionize the gimmickry and mostly irrelevant questions, as some kind of watershed event in the way that political dialogue will now be carried out. Whether we have questioners dressed as snowmen, or yielding assault rifles, or the scripted questions being spoonfed by the likes of Jim Lehrer, the current debate format absolutely sucks!

I didn’t watch the debate, but I could have predicted the near orgasmic gushing that would follow the proceedings. Which brings us back to the questions, which I viewed online and from transcripts of the debate. The form which we ask our questions will determine the answers that we get. As Francis Bacon put it, some 350 years ago, “There arises from bad and unapt formation of words a wonderful obstruction of the mind.” Bacon’s quote is a fitting definition for stupidity, which our culture is drowning in at the present time.

As Postman commented upon, in Conscientious Objections, it may be that "we have adapted ourselves to disinformation, to Newspeak, to public relations hype, to imagery disguised as thought, to picture newspapers (USA Today comes to mind) and magazines, to religion revealed in the form of entertainment, to politics in the form of a thirty-second television commercial."

This last one is what our political debates are about—30-second television commercials.

Take for instance Hillary Clinton, when asked if she considered herself a “liberal,” demurred by answering Rob Porter’s YouTube clip by saying that she preferred the word “progressive.”

This won’t be a problem for Clinton because no one but a few sticklers for historicity, even know what the hell progressive once stood for. For all the brain-addled masses know, her self-identifying as a “progressive’ might mean that she’s been bought and paid for by Progressive Insurance, since we’re not far away from having corporate spots accenting our political events, like our sports; as if that would be a problem—our candidates are already bought and sold.

Not that it matters, but when I hear Clinton call herself a progressive, I alternate between laughter and screams. Some of us still know what the term once meant—particularly as it was used during the 19th century, when it came to mean a definite alternative to the conservative solutions being offered in dealing with the social and economic issues of the day.

Historically, progressive candidates, particularly in the early years of the 20th century, were concerned with social justice and workers rights, not being some watered down version of conservatism that much of Clinton’s platform represents.

For those who have read about progressives like Robert “Fighting Bob” LaFollette, a man who in his day was called “arguably the most important and recognized leader of the opposition to the growing dominance of corporations over the Government.” Not something that Ms. Clinton would know much about.

You see, true progressives, like LaFollette, actually had some backbone and principals, something that Clinton knows little about. LaFollette, was a friend of Emma Goldman, who called LaFollette "the finest, most inconsistent anarchist" of his time. Can you imagine any modern candidate, who associated with the likes of known radicals, like Goldman, having a chance in the era of "handled" candidates--people who have every wardrobe, as well as word, picked out for them, to wear and say?

LaFollette was a man so fierce in his convictions that he would risk consignment to political oblivion rather than abandon an unpopular position. He represented the antithesis of the elected officials whose compromises characterize our contemporary condition, officials like Hillary Clinton.

La Follette believed strongly that the inheritors of America's revolutionary tradition would, if given the truth, opt not for moderation but for the most radical of solutions. This doesn’t sound much like Clinton, or Obama, for that matter.

No, Mrs. Clinton, you may not be a liberal, but you most certainly aren’t a progressive, at least in a historical sense.

Dark and getting darker

There are no easy answers to life’s questions. Maybe that’s why fewer and fewer people seem to care about searching for any. It’s much easier to follow sports, or invest in reality-based television. Your investment allows you to experience a common bond with thousands of other people and while it leads to groupthink, there is a certain comfort in conformity.

Concern about the dumbing down of the masses isn’t new, at least in America. Writers and thinkers have been conscious of this for decades, if not longer. One of the classic books on the subject, Richard Hofstadter’s, Anti-intellectualism in American Life spoke to these issues 40 years ago. Things haven’t gotten measurably better since Hofstadter. Others more recently, notably Morris Berman, have waxed eloquent about the ramifications of America’s functional illiteracy and our nation’s cultural decline.

As a consequence of letting others do our thinking for us, we’ve seen book reading fall out of favor (with all due respect to Harry Potter), political civility and discourse at all-time lows and the supply of social capital continue to decline. None of this bodes well for democracy and many of the institutions that exist to further it, here in the “homeland” (an Orwellian term if there ever was one) and abroad.

Consumin’ is what we do. When two buildings melted to the ground, our president sent us to the malls. As James Mitchell, cultural critic said, “There is barely an empty space in our culture not already carrying commercial messages." Nowhere is this more evident than the world of sports. While billboards and signage has always graced ballparks and other venues, now every pause and segue is brought to you by some corporate behemoth. George Steiner had it right when he said that we live in a “systematic suppression of silence.”

Back to Hofstadter, this is not new. However, we’ve taken a turn for the worse, in my opinion, as the intellectual is ridiculed and knowledge becomes suspect and something to scoff at. We now need everything spoon fed to us—our news, our entertainment and our politics.

Berman has a new book, a blog and if interested, here’s a review of Dark Ages, America: The Final Phase of Empire. From the review is the following paragraph that helps sum up what I see as pervasive in our culture--the tyranny of the individual.

The ethos of American individualism is Berman’s particular preoccupation. It has frontier roots but is also an effect (as well as a contributing cause) of the victory of automobiles and suburbanization over mass transit and European-style city planning. "The relentless American habit of choosing the individual solution over the collective one," Berman writes, underlies "the design of our cities, including the rise of a car culture, the growth of the suburbs, and the nature of our architecture, [which] has had an overwhelming impact on the life of the nation as a whole, reflecting back on all the issues discussed [in this book]: work, children, media, community, economy, technology, globalization, and, especially, US foreign policy. The physical arrangements of our lives mirror the spiritual ones."

In one of his comments on the blog, Berman mentions that he doubts any more than one percent of Americans know what a metaphor is and the inherent difficultly of living with that, as conversation becomes more and more of a challenge—unless of course you want to talk about sports.

In wrapping up this somewhat disjointed post—there’s some unresolved tension in the thoughts and ideas that Berman has me pondering and I’m trying to process, but I’m not sure what the resolution is at the moment and maybe there is none to be had.

I’m thinking back to some of the prior reading I’ve done from writers like Neil Postman, Jacques Ellul and others; I was struck by the following passage from an essay on Herbert Marcuse that I located at the website of Logos, a quarterly journal with some interesting topics pertaining to modern culture, politics and society at large.

The essay on Marcuse, written by Arnold Farr, is titled, “Democracy, Social Change and One-Dimensionality: Reviving Marcuse.” Farr is citing Marcuse and his essay, “Social Implications of Technology,” where Marcuse has this to say about technology:

Technology, as a mode of production, as the totality of instruments, devices and contrivances which characterize the machine age is thus at the same time a mode of organizing and perpetuating (or changing) social relationships, a manifestation of prevalent thought and behavior patterns, an instrument for control and domination.

Farr adds his commentary on Marcuse, utilizing the dialectic between the liberation that technology always promises and the oppression that often gets delivered, discussing why most Americans get so uptight when technology is criticized.

Also, with respect to technology, many people are given just enough of the benefits of the technological society that they are afraid of rebelling for fear that they may lose what they have. Even the poorest homes have a TV set.

Farr's commentary on Marcuse's critique of technology would be one that I’d be most comfortable with and concur that it is more accurate, citing the negative implications of technology and not granting it the status of savior of mankind that it most often gets credited as being; catalyst for consumption maybe.

Berman’s dismal assertion (while probably anecdotal) concerning awareness of metaphor is troubling.

Clarification, apology and a side of crow

This will be my third post related to the NPR story that ran, July 3rd, on the depressed mill town of Skowhegan, Maine. The feature, produced by reporter Adam Davidson, portrayed Skowhegan in a light that I characterized as overly negative.

In my analysis and then, the posting of a letter I wrote, I took some "pot shots" at Davidson that were unfair and unprofessional. He's a journalist and he came to Skowhegan in search of a story. He left with what he fairly, or unfairly felt were the issues he discovered on the ground.

Mr. Davidson earned my respect by emailing me and offering me additional perspective. He didn't have to do this and I commend him for taking the time to do so; in my own email back to him, I explained my own thoughts/feelings, as well as apologizing for my personal attack upon him as a journalist. Without sharing all the details, let me say that here are a few points that need to be made, before putting this to bed (which, seeing it's nearing 2 am, might be something I ought to consider doing with my own sorry self).

1) Mr. Davidson didn't do a "drive by" story, as I insinuated, but was on the ground in the Skowhegan area for four days. Apparently that's more than the usual time spent by NPR reporters, which begs the question, "how can you fully understand cultural issues germane to a story like his, without spending even more time than that, talking with locals and actually beginning to crack the cultural code of rural places?"

2) He felt some of his subjects, particularly Mary Jane Clifford, the town's General Assistance director, were articulate spokespeople for the town. I still disagree and think she came across as one-dimensional, but that's my opinion.

3) Mr. Davidson's job is not to write puff pieces, but to tell the truth. I agree with that, I just think a bit more balance on the more "positive" side, like including something about a business that's chosen to locate to Skowhegan, like Backyard Farms, would have helped to at least leave a listener with something positive to "hang their hat on."

Blogging tends to be imperfect in the sense that it allows someone who processes by writing, to spew and issue pronouncements and occasionally treat people with less respect than is fair, which is what I did in the case of Mr. Davidson.

I've responded to Davidson with my own email and promise to try to use Words Matter less as my own personal launch pad and more as a place to disseminate information, albeit uniquely informed with my own thoughts, opinions and yes, biases.