Category Archives: Random Blogging

The 2008 Presidential campaign is already in full gear. The debates have begun, and it won’t be long before we’re inundated with political commercials.  

 

It’s impossible to predict, at this stage, who the eventual nominees will be. For one thing, what people want in a president tends to be highly idiosyncratic. (My grandmother voted for John F. Kennedy because she loved his hair.)

 

Most of us want someone who agrees with us on the issues, but we also want someone we can trust to exercise good judgment when the unexpected occurs. Most want someone who is a strong leader, although we tend to disagree about what “strength” looks like. Until recently, most Americans wanted a President with “likability,” someone you’d like to have a beer with—but polls suggest that the experiences of the past six years have diminished the appeal of “regular guys” somewhat.

 

That experience has also shaped my own list of what I want in the next President.

   

I want someone who understands the context of Presidential action. Without understanding the foundations of America’s constitutional culture, an administration simply cannot operate effectively—whatever its goals. Lack of familiarity with  geopolitical realities threatens not just American, but global, security. Genuinely understanding the context in which he operates requires a President with an open mind, a curious nature, and high intelligence.

 

I also want someone who has “the vision thing.” As Theodore Hesburgh once said “You can’t blow an uncertain trumpet.” But vision is not stubborness. America needs leaders who know the difference.

 

I want someone with superior communication skills—the ability to bring a divided people together, the ability to inspire hope rather than fear, and the ability to listen as well as talk.

 

Perhaps most of all, I am looking for authenticity. Authenticity is the extent to which people are true to their real selves, the extent to which they refuse to play a role in order to achieve political success. Authenticity doesn’t mean acting without any strategic calculus—sane people respond appropriately to their environments, and to the incentives and disincentives built in to those environments. But for authentic people, there is a line that doesn’t get crossed.

 

Authentic people are emotionally mature, they have the ability to laugh at themselves, they listen to dissenting voices without becoming defensive, and they can distinguish between policy disputes and personal attacks. They learn from their mistakes, and they recognize the limits of their own knowledge. Emotional maturity is not an absence of ego—we’d never get national leadership if that were a condition of candidacy! It is instead the possession of a particular kind of ego, a particular kind of inner security that allows recognition of one’s own limits.

 

I want someone who understands accountability. There’s a world of difference between Truman’s “The buck stops here” and Bush’s “I’m the decider.”  The first says “I accept responsibility.” The second says “I’m the boss.”

 

As Abraham Lincoln said “If you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”

 

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On January 26^th, Phil Rutledge died.

 

I doubt if many of the people reading this knew Phil, although he was an immensely accomplished public servant and scholar. Phil was a black man born in 1925 in Dawson, Georgia. He later moved to Jacksonville, Florida, which he left to join the Navy after refusing the demand of a white man that he give up his seat on the bus they both were riding.

 

Phil’s life was a string of distinctions: an undergraduate degree in Political Science and Sociology, a Masters of Public Health, and a series of increasingly important positions in government, beginning with posts in Detroit city government, then moving to the Department of Labor during Lyndon Johnson’s administration, and Health, Education and Welfare during the Nixon administration. A list of his civic contributions and honors fills four pages.

 

The  credentials and accomplishments impress, but they leave out the essence of the man Phil Rutledge was: a good, profoundly gentle human being, a man who responded to hate with logic and scholarship. I never heard him raise his voice; I never saw him too busy to help a colleague or a student. He was already an emeritus Professor at SPEA when I joined the faculty, a towering figure in academic organizations, and a tireless worker for better understanding among those of different races, religions and orientations.

 

Phil believed in the power of scholarship to improve government and in the power of government to do good. He wasn’t naive. He knew that government power could be—and often is—misused. He was a great civil libertarian. But he also had faith that good government was obtainable, that good people and good will could solve problems. He believed in social equity and fair play, in a whole that really did transcend the sum of its parts.

 

Most of all, Phil preached the importance of civic engagement by the university and those of us who teach here. He believed in using our skills to serve the community, to make  things better than they are. He believed in the possibility—if not the reality—of a fairer system, a more level playing field, a society where human dignity is respected—and he spent his time trying to make it so.

 

Phil Rutledge was a model of what citizenship should be. His professional accomplishments (particularly given the barriers black men of his generation had to overcome) were impressive, but those accomplishments were “extras.” The lesson he gave us was more elemental—and more attainable. He didn’t return hate with hate; he didn’t let a system that was weighted against him keep him down. He got up every day and was a good human being, a good member of society, and a profoundly engaged citizen.   

 

In our current, poisonous political environment, where public service is discounted and cynicism is too frequently justified, we all need to remember—and emulate as best we can—the good guys who are working for a better world. Like Phil Rutledge.     

 

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In the wake of what he conceeded was “a thumping,” President Bush promised a renewed emphasis on bipartisanship, and a good-faith effort to work across the aisle with the new Democratic majority.

 

Activists on both sides of that aisle remain skeptical. The former Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, Harold Koh, now Dean of Yale Law School, spoke at a conference held just a few days after the midterm elections. Asked about the odds of bipartisanship during the remainder of Bush’s presidency, he quoted the psychiatrist who was asked to change a light bulb: “First, the light bulb really has to want to change.”    

 

If Bush’s actions in the week following the election are any indication, change is a distant goal. First, the President sent John Bolton’s nomination to be U.N. Ambassador back to the Senate, where he had to know it would be dead on arrival. Bolton—named by Bush in a recess appointment after it became clear that he could not be confirmed even by a Senate dominated by Republicans—is widely considered an unmitigated disaster at a time when effective American diplomacy is an urgent imperative.

 

If the Bolton renomination wasn’t “in your face” enough, the President followed up by renominating a group of hard-Right judges who had previously failed to win confirmation for the federal bench.

 

For sheer chutzpah, however, nothing surpasses Bush’s appointment of Eric Keroack to head up family planning programs at the Department of Health and Human Services. In his new capacity, according to HHS, he will oversee $283 million dollars in annual family-planning grants “designed to provide access to contraceptive supplies and information to all who want and need them, with priority given to low-income persons.”

 

Dr. Keroack previously worked at a Christian “Crisis Pregnancy” clinic that forbid its employees from referring patients to birth control providers. He has been widely quoted as saying that the distribution of contraceptives “demeans women” and “increases out-of-wedlock pregnancy.” He opposes not just abortion, but also birth control and sex education.

 

If individuals believe that birth control is immoral, that is their prerogative. Putting an implacable foe of family planning in charge of the United States government’s family planning programs is another matter entirely.

 

As many abortion opponents have noted, the most effective way to reduce abortion is to reduce unwanted pregnancies. Even if abstinence-based sex education programs were effective—and a multitude of studies suggests otherwise—they are manifestly inappropriate for married couples who want to plan their families. Rigid proponents of  abstinence-based procreation doctrines are equally inappropriate choices to run government family planning offices.  

 

The moral and religious beliefs of Americans are incredibly diverse. The genius of our constitutional system is that by keeping government out of arguments about religious doctrine and observance—by confining government to matters that require communal action—we have largely averted the sectarian disputes that have torn other nations apart. We have made bipartisanship and cooperation possible.

 

But first, we have to want to cooperate.   

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    In the wake of what he conceeded was “a thumping,” President Bush promised a renewed emphasis on bipartisanship, and a good-faith effort to work across the aisle with the new Democratic majority. 

 

    Activists on both sides of that aisle remain skeptical. The former Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, Harold Koh, now Dean of Yale Law School, spoke at a conference held just a few days after the midterm elections. Asked about the odds of bipartisanship during the remainder of Bush’s presidency, he quoted the psychiatrist who was asked to change a light bulb: “First, the light bulb really has to want to change.”    

    If Bush’s actions in the week following the election are any indication, change is a distant goal. First, the President sent John Bolton’s nomination to be U.N. Ambassador back to the Senate, where he had to know it would be dead on arrival. Bolton—named by Bush in a recess appointment after it became clear that he could not be confirmed even by a Senate dominated by Republicans—is widely considered an unmitigated disaster at a time when effective American diplomacy is an urgent imperative.

    If the Bolton renomination wasn’t “in your face” enough, the President followed up by renominating a group of hard-Right judges who had previously failed to win confirmation for the federal bench.

    For sheer chutzpah, however, nothing surpasses Bush’s appointment of Eric Keroack to head up family planning programs at the Department of Health and Human Services. In his new capacity, according to HHS, he will oversee $283 million dollars in annual family-planning grants “designed to provide access to contraceptive supplies and information to all who want and need them, with priority given to low-income persons.”

   

Dr. Keroack previously worked at a Christian “Crisis Pregnancy” clinic that forbid its employees from referring patients to birth control providers. He has been widely quoted as saying that the distribution of contraceptives “demeans women” and “increases out-of-wedlock pregnancy.” He opposes not just abortion, but also birth control and sex education.

    

If individuals believe that birth control is immoral, that is their prerogative. Putting an implacable foe of family planning in charge of the United States government’s family planning programs is another matter entirely.

    As many abortion opponents have noted, the most effective way to reduce abortion is to reduce unwanted pregnancies. Even if abstinence-based sex education programs were effective—and a multitude of studies suggests otherwise—they are manifestly inappropriate for married couples who want to plan their families. Rigid proponents of  abstinence-based procreation doctrines are equally inappropriate choices to run government family planning offices.  

    The moral and religious beliefs of Americans are incredibly diverse. The genius of our constitutional system is that by keeping government out of arguments about religious doctrine and observance—by confining government to matters that require communal action—we have largely averted the sectarian disputes that have torn other nations apart. We have made bipartisanship and cooperation possible.

    But first, we have to want to cooperate.   

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   Every year, I think the campaign ads can’t get any worse—and every year, the inventive souls who churn them out surprise me.

  

It’s bad enough that every vote is twisted to prove that the person who cast it is a deviant intent upon destroying America, and complex issues are portrayed as choices between good and evil so that they can be shoehorned into 30-second sound bites. Even worse—if that’s possible—is the choice of issues to highlight.

  

When the New Jersey Supreme Court, consisting of four Republicans and three Democrats, held unanimously that “denying commited same-sex couples the financial and social benefits given their married heterosexual counterparts bears no substantial relationship to a legitimate government purpose,” the joy and relief was palpable. Republicans were ecstatic. (Gays were generally pleased, too.) Nationally and locally, GOP candidates fell all over themselves proclaiming the centrality of the issue, and the mortal danger posed to the republic should we fail to amend the constitution to ensure that same sex couples will never, ever be able to file joint tax returns.

  

Presumably, voters will now recognize the triviality of such issues as the fiasco in Iraq, where nearly 3000 young Americans and perhaps 600,000 Iraqis have died. We will ignore the re-emergence of the Taliban in Afghanistan. We will ignore the fact that we sent our troops into danger without proper equipment and without a viable military strategy or exit plan. (Okay, apparently without any strategy or exit plan.)

   Vo

ters will stop worrying about billions of dollars ripped off by Halliburton and other cronies of the Administration who received juicy no-bid contracts, both in Iraq and Louisiana. And we certainly will stop carping about the incompetence of the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina. That was over a year ago, after all—the New Jersey threat is fresh and new, and voters have short memories.

  

Surely, voters will understand intuitively that the threat posed by committed gay couples is far greater than the threat posed by refusing to implement the recommendations of the 9-11 Commission, or by the warrantless wiretapping and data mining of American citizens by our own government. How many times has the average citizen really needed the right of habeas corpus? What is worse, after all—letting the President decide who is an enemy combatant, and what constitutes torture, or the prospect that Adam and Steve might actually move into the house next door?

 

Maybe it will work one more time. Maybe those who are terrified of the social change

represented by acceptance of our gay neighbors will once again elevate the issue of gay marriage over and above all other considerations, and energize the Republican base. But maybe not. A recent Ipsos Public Affairs Survey commissioned by the AP asked likely voters who they trusted most to handle a series of issues. On same-sex marriage, 46% trusted Democrats; 36% trusted Republicans.

 

As the President says, “fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again."

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