Would you have a beer with Chris Christie?

All of this talk about Gov. Chris Christie misses the point — and the point isn’t what he weighs, how much he won by in New Jersey, how cooperative he was, or how mean he can be. The point is that he can’t win. The last three Republicans to win national office have done so on a “nicer than the other guy” character platform that has created the modern entanglement that we consider a Compassionate Conservative. Ronald Reagan was folksy, a silver-screen cowboy with a sharp wit; George H. W. Bush, even in his first run, appeared kindly and competent; George W. Bush ran on the written-about “would you have a beer with him?” platform of good times in bygone days.

Would you have a beer with Chris Christie?

For much of the middle of the country — and for their majorities that bleed and vote red every year — the answer seems like an obvious no. Christie has a resume that reads like the greatest hits of the Midwestern inferiority complex soundtrack. Governor of a tiny East Coast state? Check. Accent like something off of television? Check. Blunt? Yup. Well-versed in urban politics? Uh-uh. Outsized personality from a teeny-tiny spec on the map? And on and on.

Of course there’s going to be work done to blunt these effects. Christie’s new chairmanship of the Republican Governor’s Association will help. He may not be a friendly face, but he can be a familiar one in many of the on-the-border reddish rust-belt states. Maybe his

Look, Mitt Romney collected the usual run of red states because that’s what red states do. However, I think it goes beyond the evidence to say that Romney earned their enthusiastic support. Throwing an East Coast governor at the middle states again is going to cause some dissent in the ranks — maybe enough to get a noisy Rand Paul candidacy noticed at the Iowa State Fair.

So far, it’s hard to picture Christie in comfortable campaign mode in the warm western states. The first time he puts on a pair of cowboy boots or gets snuck into a sweaty high school gym and propped up in front of carefully selected folks in overalls, he’s going to look every bit like the Garden State candidate.

I say this knowing full well that the Democrats’ best chance candidate has exactly the same problems — but no one expects Hillary to win Kansas.

^{Photo Credit: Beer by HeadCRasher on Flickr via CC By-NC-SA)}

Real Health Reform

^{I am a scandal.}

Today, the F.D.A. admitted that it bowed to pressure from congressmen in approving an unsafe “patch” for patients with a torn or damaged meniscus (a common knee injury). The patch, called Menaflex, routinely failed and required patients to seek further surgery, but was approved for use after both New Jersey senators and two of the state’s congressmen lobbied for its approval. All four had received sizable campaign donations from the maker of Menaflex, ReGen Biologics.

The report [PDF] makes for interesting, if dense, reading. It’s the result of an internal FDA investigtion spurred in part by coverage like the Wall Street Journal’s March piece, “Political Lobbying Drove FDA Process,” and also by congressional inquiries and loud internal dissent.

Business as usual in Washington? Maybe. Certainly, it’s a story that Senators Bob Menendez and Frank Lautenberg and Representatives Frank Pallone Jr. and Steve Rothman should be ashamed of. Nice work, Jersey.

But there’s a bigger story here, and it’s one that we haven’t seen much of during the health care debate. Check this out [NYT]:

The [FDA] report, sharply critical of the agency and the lawmakers, demonstrates the sharp departure from the past that the Obama administration intends to take in approving devices and publicizing its internal deliberations.

On Wednesday, the agency asked the Institute of Medicine to review the entire process by which the agency approves the vast majority of medical devices.

Both the request to the Institute of Medicine as well as the agency’s reassessment of its approval of ReGen’s knee device augurs poorly for the entire medical device industry, for whom the F.D.A. is a crucial gatekeeper. For decades, most medical devices have received only cursory reviews of their safety and efficacy from the agency.

One of the most abstract and difficult to grasp parts of the Obama health care plan has been the insistence that cost-cutting measures can account for a savings that will partially fund a national plan. The argument makes it sound very simple — we just stop wasting money. Phrasing it that way, though, makes it sound like something fake. If it were really that simple, why wouldn’t someone have done it before now?

The truth is it’s not that simple. There are thousands of people and millions of dollars heavily invested in making sure that wasteful practices continue in health care, because hospitals, doctors, insurance companies, medical research firms, and just about any other health-care related organization you can think of benefit from the government (and others) being willing to put up “whatever it costs.” People like those at ReGen, who were apparently quite comfortable spending money to get a sub-par and dangerous medical aide put on the market, and — if their corporate report of $X profit is correct — were also quite happy to profit from both it and from their campaign connections.

This is the other side of the “death panels” fear story. The government can intervene in medical decisions at the production end to the betterment of all. American pocketbooks and the knees that carry them will benefit from this decision.

Happy Constitution Day!

Recently, a friend on Open Salon asked how I managed to keep reading and writing about politics, when the last few months have been so full of disappointment and frustration. Part of my answer was simple dorkness:

I’ve been reading a lot about the American revolution — right now I’m working on an Alexander Hamilton biography — and everything about that time reminds me that everything we’re looking at now, all of the ugliness, all of the craziness — it was ten times worse back then, and the country was much shakier at the time, too. I mean, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both took over newspapers to essentially slander each other’s characters, Alexander Hamilton was killed by a former vice president in a duel, and now we remember them as wise heroes of a kinder age. And they fought all their battles when the country could’ve easily broken apart around them. So I spend some time telling myself, OK, things suck, people are getting crazy and illogical, but — at the end of this, even if things go as badly as they possibly could, we’ll still have the status quo, which is a functioning government, regular elections, and continued chances to change things every time we go to the polls.

I’ve kept thinking about this as time has gone on and as I’ve read more about the early years of the Revolution. Unlike now, every one of those early patriots had to go to bed with the fear that he would wake not to another day of controversy in America, but to a new day of no country at all. Anarchy and chaos were real possibilities. No matter how terrible things get — and yes, they’ve been pretty terrible of late — I have never gone to sleep thinking that, perhaps, tomorrow, there will be no more United States.

Maybe that’s terrible optimism. Governments rise and fall all the time in the world, in countries small and large, and people survive. I’d like to think that I’m not so blindly tied to my nationality that I could survive in a world without America, where an American identity was meaningless — but I’m not sure it’s true.

Thus today is of special import for me. It’s Constitution Day. Two hundred and twenty-two years ago, on September 17, 1787, the new Constitution of the United States of America was adopted by the Constitutional Convention, signed by the 39 delegates, and sent out to the states for ratification. The National Archives, where the original text still lives, headlines it as “a model of cooperative statesmanship and the art of compromise,” and that has continued to be true throughout its history. We may not agree upon its meaning, always, or its deployment, but Americans almost to a person seem to agree upon its value. Our stability as a country — and we are a shockingly stable union — rests most firmly upon the survival of this document.

That’s not to say that the Constitution is a stony, implacable thing. In fact, even its adoption didn’t really mark its birth.  It would take another three years before the Bill of Rights were added, in 1791, and it’s been amended another 17 times since then. Even now, there are several proposals for amendment before Congress. Sure, it’s been used for good and for ill, to justify moments of greatness and horrible errors, but it’s still there, binding us to a common set of purposes. Is it outdated? Moldy in language and, certainly, in its descriptions of who should be a citizen? Absolutely. But what do you expect from the oldest written national constitution in the world? Perfection? No — never in our Constitution. It is a document notable for its mistakes, but also for its ability to rise above them, to amend its own content without changing its real purpose. It is a truly American thing.

So — go forth and celebrate like it’s 1787. Lift an ale (Sam Adams, anyone?), try the Which Founding Father Are You? quiz (I’m James Madison), take a stroll about your free and enduring country, and meditate on the meaning of the document still holding us together:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Tales of a Former Treasury Secretary

On this anniversary of the Fall of Lehman, I’d like to take a moment to discuss one of the big “villains” of that era: Mr. Hank “King Henry” Paulson, the former treasury secretary.  About a week ago, I stayed up late to devour Todd Purdham’s lengthy, three-years-in-the-making piece on Paulson, which I recommend. Of the Current Events must-reads on my list this fall, Hank Paulson’s memoir of the crisis probably makes the top ten. I’m really (really!) not an ongoing Treasury Secretary Stalker, I promise (and not just because it’s a condition of my parole). Instead, I want to read Paulson’s book because I find him to be a compelling character in our recent national drama: For better and worse, he’s simultaneously the man who said in mid-2008 that the system was strong and everyone was handling things just fine and the man who only weeks later went down on one knee to beg Nancy Pelosi to pass the bank bailout.  He’s the man who was — it seems — very much driving the bus when Lehman went under it.

But he’s not that simple.  At times he seems like a Democrat trapped in Republican cabinetry: He’s rumored to have willed the entirety of his fortune, upon his death, to nature conservation, because “saving the environment is a ‘race against time, the ultimate global issue.'” While working for Goldman Sachs in Illinois, he and his wife lived in a farmhouse that had, at one point, four named raccoons running freely through it, along with Paulson’s pet snakes, flying squirrels, mice, dogs, cats and turtles. He names Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank as his favorite congresspeople in the Purdham interview. He is the author of the bank bailout and about the first advocate for cash infusions into banks — also known in GOP circles as socialism — that we saw last year.

He’s also the guy who engineered some rather shady deals while in the Bush administration, deals (like the AIG bailout) that have benefited Goldman Sachs, his old company, and deals (like the failure of Lehman Brothers) that seem to have been botched as much through neglect and disorganization as malevolent intent.  While at Goldman, he pushed for and benefited from the rule changes in the 1990s and early 2000s that contributed to the current crisis.  And he still seems to believe that he wouldn’t do much differently, given the chance.

In short, I do not know what to make of Henry Paulson. I do not believe Purdham’s claim that history will figure this out; I think, perhaps, that questions about the character and make-up of a man, any man, but particularly a distant, celebrity figure like Paulson, are often unanswerable, because they require a level of objectivity people just cannot achieve. I would like to believe that Hank Paulson was a villain, but I am increasingly aware that it’s just not that simple. He, like even those I hate the most, was usually doing what he thought was best. He was usually doing the best that he could, and if that is his failing, well, it’s really the failing of the man who hired him.

Just as I don’t know what to make of Paulson, neither, it seems, does Todd Purdham, even after three years of semi-regular meetings with the man who had the nation’s ATM card in his pocket. Purdham’s piece is a wonderful example of post-event journalism, the kind of thing for which Bob Woodward is pretty famous. Purdham essentially traded continuing access for a guarantee not to print anything as it happened. This is a bit of a Faustian bargain — a journalist trades away the opportunity to report on news as it happens for better long-term access to the source. The idea is that seeing someone more regularly, and talking to them over the longer term, often provides a more accurate picture — with that much-lauded journalistic ideal, context — of the man in the center of the storm. Beyond which, of course, there are dozens of other journos covering the day-to-day. 

It took me a while, but I think this bargain was worth it, even with how ultimately unsurprising the long piece on Paulson is. Was Paulson more candid with Purdham than he’s been in other interviews? Sure.  Purdham’s promise to keep things off the record until they couldn’t change the immediate course of things most likely did elicit commentary that will help future journalists and historians clarify what exactly happened last year. 

But there’s a price for all of that, and reading something like Purdham’s piece so quickly after the fact, the cost seems particularly clear. If, a year ago, Henry Paulson had come out and said, Pelosi is right, the Republicans are wrong, and I’m being obstructed from adequately doing my job by the ideological bent at the White House, he could have changed the course of our current national crisis. At the very least, he could have changed the tone of the conversation about it, instead of letting it become an even deeper, more entrenched partisan battle. A member of the Bush cabinet speaking out about the Bush madness — and speaking out clearly, in a language of numbers, from the strength of his Goldman Sachs, friend-of-the-street credentials — would have meant something in September 2008. Hearing it a year later is interesting, but has less effect.

I’d apply that to most of the post-mortems I’m seeing today about Lehman, as well. Understanding what happened after the fact is nice, but I don’t think we’re yet so far away that we can understand things.

On Health Care, Now It’s Up to Us

The hardest argument the Obama administration has to make, and the one that I feel the president is still not making to the best effect, is that things must change. It’s evident to the 40 million uninsured Americans that we need a fix, and it’s evident to anyone who’s been dropped from their health insurance, denied coverage because of a preexisting condition, or reached that ever-dreaded cap and had to start paying out of pocket to survive. It’s also evident to anyone who’s studied national bankruptcy statistics or a breakdown of our national debt.

That’s still not a majority of Americans.

What we don’t talk about that often is that there are still over 100,000,000 Americans who are pretty happy with how things are. These are people who feel no personal urgency to get better health insurance coverage passed. They were the crowd the president started speaking to this evening, and they are the crowd that Republicans and those against a public option have been pursuing from the start.

That’s why the way this debate is framed is so crucial. We can tell all the stories we like about people dying and suffering because of insufficient health care — but it’s easier for someone who has health care to believe that those stories are exceptions than it is to believe they’re the rule. To accept that these stories are true and that they really can happen to anyone, you have to accept that bad health and bad fortune can happen to you.

Most of us have a lot of difficulty accepting that until it happens to us or to someone close to us. Young, healthy Americans will struggle with this. Americans who still say, “my dad ate bacon every morning and never saw a doctor in his life, and he lived to be 90” will struggle with this. Americans fortunate enough to have certain employment or personal wealth will struggle with this. Yet every one of those groups is in danger of facing a sudden reversal of fortune — one catastrophic car crash, one debilitating stroke, one fight with unpreventable cancer, and your mind will change.

Short of 3-D horror films, what will overcome this adherence to the status quo? Two things: first, honesty from our political leaders about what their plans aim to do and what they cost. I hope the President was serious about calling people out when they misrepresent his plan; I hope the media will also dig in and call out both sides when they exaggerate. If those who like the status quo are convinced that they can basically keep it — that they can have “status quo plus,” — they will be less likely to be frightened, and more likely to be supportive.

Second, in the same way that a person’s mind is most likely to be changed about the wisdom of gay marriage when they know someone who’s gay, a person’s mind is most likely to be changed when they know someone who has faced physical or financial ruin because of a health problem. This is one time when anecdotes are helpful.

I think there’s a lack of open discussion about health problems in America. Sure, older Americans might make their daily aches, pains, and medications the centerpiece of their lunch chatter, but it’s pretty rare for younger Americans to talk with their friends about these things. Yet if you know someone who’s having her life turned upside down by unpaid medical bills, you’re more likely to start wondering seriously whether that could ever happen to you. If you have a friend at work who isn’t on the offered plan because her pre-existing condition — something as insidious as, say, pregnancy — didn’t allow her to enroll, wouldn’t you be tempted to check and see what, exactly, you’re covered for? And if you made that investigation — wouldn’t you (like many, many, many Americans) be very likely to find out how vulnerable you are?

I say, for the next month or so, the personal story is the best weapon. If you have a story, tell it — tell it here, tell it at the watercooler, tell it at your family reunion, your church picnic, your book group. More than speeches and town halls, I think from here out, stories can be what will save us.

Van Jones Resigns: Bad News for Activism?

The Associated Press reports tonight that Van Jones, the so-called Green Jobs Czar in the Obama administration, has resigned. Though Jones has always been a bit controversial to conservative pundits, the tipping point for the White House seems to have been the revelation this week of his signature on a 2004 petition from 911Truth.org, which “calls for immediate public attention to unanswered questions that suggest that people within the current administration may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war.”  In his statement, Jones said:

I have been inundated with calls — from across the political spectrum — urging me to “stay and fight.” But I came here to fight for others, not for myself. I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past. We need all hands on deck, fighting for the future.

A video of Jones calling Republicans “assholes” at a February Q&A at Berkeley also surfaces this week (let’s go to the tape) and kicked off what has probably been about the worst week of his life. There’s been no shortage of right-wing criticism of Jones since he took the job in May, particularly from Glenn Beck, who — I’m sure this is a coincidence — found his show facing an advertising boycott last month organized by a group that Jones founded.

So that’s the news.  What’s the commentary? I think this is sad. Yeah, having read the 911 petition, which is pretty short, I think that was a stupid move on Jones’s part — but I also think it’s possible that, as other signers have claimed, the statement he signed may have been different. Either way, it’d be a good idea, if you’re going to play in politics, to keep good copies of anything you put your name on. Even assuming he read it, the language, while inflammatory, is calling for a lawful investigation, not any kind of revolution or violent action. It’s asking a question. Is it an offensive question? Yeah, to a lot of people. But it’s still a question, and Jones’s signature — like that of the other 98 Notable Americans (including Ed Asner, of all people) and about 50 family members of 9/11 victims — means he supports looking at the question more completely, not that he’s found the answer.

Beyond that, and getting to this issue of whether it was inappropriate for Jones to call Republicans (and himself) “assholes” before he took a job with the administration, well, right here you have the reason that White House after White House is filled with tepid, self-protecting fans of the status quo rather than progressive go-getters. If you fill a house with activists, this kind of stuff is going to come up. People who feel things passionately — as Jones clearly feels for the issue of creating green jobs — speak passionately and act passionately. That can certainly be to their detriment, but I think quite often this kind of passion and commitment is to the benefit of their cause. It should be harnessed, maybe tamed, but not so quickly held against them.

The decision the administration made not to defend Jones is understandable, I guess, because they feel they need to spend political capital elsewhere. At some point, though, you run out of political capital in the other direction — no one wants to work for a White House that doesn’t defend its ardent supporters.

Election 2009: New Jersey’s Got Somethin’ For Ya

Just when you thought it was safe to go outside again, there are elections looming.  Not just the 2010 elections that are suddenly being chattered about: actual elections, coming up in November.  Both New Jersey and Virginia hold their gubernatorial elections in “off” years, and if ever there was an off year — here we are.  (There’s also an election coming up in the Northern Mariana Islands — who wants to volunteer to do some on-site reporting with me?)

For those who don’t live with the New York Times constantly imprinted on their eyeballs, I thought I’d do a quick run-down of who’s who and what’s what in these two races, starting with New Jersey this Tuesday and moving to Virginia next Tuesday, with a promise to revisit, at least briefly, each week until these contests get decided.

So: On to the Garden State!

In New Jersey, weighing in at an estimated personal net worth of $300 million dollars (in 2005 money), we have current governor Jon Corzine facing off against Republican challenger Christopher J. Christie¹, a former U.S. Attorney under  Corzine is pretty unpopular in New Jersey right now, where hard times have forced, well, hard budgeting. 

The seminal quick-read piece on Corzine is New York Magazine’s 2005 profile, “The Deal He Made,” which describes Corzine both as one of the most liberal, idealistic members of the Senate, when he was there, and as a guy who’s learned fast and well about the dirty realities of New Jersey politics.  In his first term as governor, Corzine has had to deal with a budget deficit that forced him to cut 3,000 state jobs, raise taxes on the wealthiest Jerseyites, and institute a sales tax increase (and a government shutdown in 2006).  Imagine how popular you’d be in New Jersey if you’d cut that many state jobs (and therefore, state services).  Now imagine you’re also the guy who once proposed dramatic increases of toll-road fees, and you’ll have the dismal re-election prospects of Jon Corzine pretty well pictured.  He currently trails Christie by 10 percent (47-37) in a Quinnipiac poll.

New Jersey is supposed to be a pretty safely blue state, right?  Well, not if Chris Christie has his way.  Democrats have a strange, dirty history in NJ, and it’s finally time to clean house — at least, this is the former prosecutor’s platform.  He had a 130-0 win record for convictions against public officials, bolstering his credibility as a corruption fighter.  It doesn’t hurt that Corzine was in office during a very memorable sweep of corrupt officials — 44 people were charged in July, including “three New Jersey mayors, two state assemblymen and five rabbis.”  A member of Corzine’s staff had his home raided.  (I don’t hold Corzine responsible for the rabbis, but the others — keep an eye out, Jon, eh?).  Christie v. Corzine, in that context, starts to look like David vs. the guy who mugged David at gunpoint with a Saturday Night Special.

Christie defeated conservative Steven Lonegan in the primaries and has had a pretty easy road for a while, attacking an unpopular governor whose party is mired in corruption (just today, a former state senator received a 2-year prison sentence on corruption charges).  He is, however, a New Jersey politcian himself, and his résumé is not without the predictable black marks: as U.S. Attorney, Christie got into the habit of handing out monitoring jobs, which are amazingly lucrative, to friends and family.  Essentially, after a firm was convicted of corruption, someone had to be appointed to watch over the firm.  Christie frequently appointed his friends or political contributors, including such luminaries as John Ashcroft (heard of him?), who won a $52 million no-bid contract to monitor a medical prosthetics company under Christie’s watch.  Christie’s response has been pretty dumb: since the money is actually paid by these companies, not by the government, there’s no conflict, he says.  Sure.  Sounds like business as usual.

The news of the last few weeks has been about Mr. Christie’s apparently improper loan to a close aide.  The loan, which Marcy Wheeler argues was below market value and therefore counts as a gift, was given to Michele Brown, an assistant U.S. Attorney during and after Christie’s tenure.  The controversy about the loan is two-fold: first, Christie failed to report his interest payments on his taxes (which, since they totaled a couple hundred dollars a year, isn’t terribly sexy); second, he continued to receive payments from Ms. Brown even after leaving the office, establishing a financial tie between a candidate for governor and a woman in a leadership position in an office pursuing dozens of legal cases against state officials, including some in the current governor’s office.  Brown has resigned her position, and Christie has apologized.  So far, the controversy doesn’t seem to be taking much of a bite out of his lead, but expect Jon Corzine’s relentless campaign ad machine to make the most of it.

Where does that leave us?  Well, we’re two full months (oy! where’s my summer gone?) from Election Day, and Jon Corzine’s trailing.  Corruption is not the worst charge one can level at a New Jersery politician, so the recent Christie scandal may not do anything to narrow the gap.  Corzine’s big advantage — his ability to spend his way to the top — may not be as big as it used to be, since one assumes he’s been hit hard in the market over the last year or so.  Yet it seems implausible that a Republican will end up governing New Jersey, so — I expect a turn around, late this month.  I expect Corzine to hitch his star to a major proposal — maybe even to try and make the national health care debate a part of the story in New Jersey — and to have a surprisingly positive appearance at the gubernatorial debate in October.  He has the money to pay for coaches, after all.  Oh, and he’s got one more thing going for him:

A sitting president willing to join him on the campaign trail.

So that’s where we stand.  Tune in next week for a tour of Viriginia, which is for lovers and, in this race, a guy whose name always makes me think of “The Office.”

^{1 Question: Why do parents do this?  Chris Christie?  It’s not like he married into that name.  What happened, one of his parents turned to the other and said, “How about Michael?” and the other went, “Gee, I dunno, make it something easier to remember.”  See also: Dave Davies, John H. Johnson, and my high school principal, whose name I’ll withhold so my detention records never hit the big time.}

A Lament For Ted Kennedy, Who Never Would Yield

You are born into a family that’s already on the way up.  You have eight brothers and sisters; you will survive seven of them.  Your life will careen between the charms and the perils of being the youngest: By the time you’re sixteen, you will lose a brother and a sister, one to war, one to a plane crash.  Another sister will be locked away following disastrous surgery.  Your family will always swirl around you, celebrate with you in good times, make things easier in bad times, and expect of you everything that their fallen sons cannot provide.

You are an unlikely achiever.  As a child and teenager, you bounce between schools and study only lightly, but you take football very seriously.  You get into Harvard on the strength of your name, and get expelled a year later.  Told — not for the last time — that you need to demonstrate good behavior before you can try again, you enlist in the Army.  It is your father’s influence — and probably his worry, having already lost his oldest son to war — that keeps you stationed safely in Paris while the Korean War flares.  You leave the military in 1953, after two years of service, honorably, Private First Class Edward M. Kennedy.

You try Harvard again.  You are moderately successful, a star on the football field and a mediocre but improving student.  Your mind is elsewhere: By 1956, your oldest living brother (and your godfather) is a senator from Massachusetts.  He publishes a book that year, Profiles in Courage, and narrowly misses becoming the nominee for Vice President; you head to the University of Virginia to start your apprenticeship in the law.  You are already talking about politics.

Still, you are the devil-may-care baby of a daring family.  Four times in law school, you are caught driving recklessly, once going 90 with your lights off down a residential street.  You keep your license, because the name on it is Kennedy.

You meet a girl, a college girl, a model.  Maybe she’s taken by your charisma; maybe you’re taken by her beauty.  You get engaged and married within a year, at your father’s urging.  Perhaps they think this will settle you down.  You come from a big family and your brothers are settled: Robert has five children already, and in 1957, Jack and Jackie have a baby girl.  You marry Joan Bennett in 1958, and maybe you are happy for a while, but nothing really changes.

In 1958, Jack needs a campaign manager for a foregone conclusion of a Senate race.  He has smarter, sharper aides to handle everything, but he gives you the campaign manager title.  You show a talent for connection with “regular folks,” with your handsome face and easy smile, your broad football shoulders, your hearty laugh.  Maybe they see in you what they don’t in your brother — an affable man who likes to sing when he drinks, a man with the flaws already floating to the surface.  You’re a Kennedy, but you’re human.  You’re a hand-shaker, a rough-and-tumble athlete, a man with a booming laugh.  You’re 26 and already a politician.

Graduation is as assured as John’s win in 1958, and in 1959 and 1960, you travel the country campaigning for your brother.  He’s going to be president.  You take charge of the Western states, and far from home you woo delegates through feats of athleticism and daring.  You ride a bucking bronco.  You work your heart out.

Jack wins.  He’s sworn in as the 35th president.  Robert — Robbie, to you — is made Attorney General.  And you take Jack’s Senate seat as your own, with your father’s blessing.  You bide your time — you’re only 28 — with an appointment as an Assistant District Attorney, until you turn 30 and can run for the seat yourself.  You beat a primary challenger who says you’re inheriting instead of earning the seat, and a Republican whose name is nearly as famous as your own.

What must you have thought, in 1962, when you were sworn into a job for which you were barely qualified?  Did you believe you’d earned it, or was it just something you wanted?  Were you proud?  Scared?  Did you have any idea that this would be both the beginning and the end for you, that this was as far as your star would ever rise?  How promising, and warm, and safe the world must have seemed that year, when you were settled at Jack’s desk — your desk — and the future was laid out before you, perfect, already formed, conquerable.  You must have had visions of a dynasty.  President Edward M. Kennedy.  Did you think it, even then?  Did you think it every day?

In 1963, you’re presiding over a dull, half-empty Senate when the word comes in: Your brother, the untouchable president, has been shot.  Robbie calls and gives you what must, at that moment, seem like the worst news you’ll ever hear: Jack is dead, killed in a car in Dallas.

This begins a wave of tragedy and accomplishment.  Your life will never even out.  You stand with your brother’s widow in the November cold of Washington, D.C.; seven months later, you are pulled from the wreckage of a plane crash by a fellow Senator and nearly die yourself.  You convalesce for a year; your wife campaigns in your absence and you’re re-elected, finally returning to the Senate in 1965, where you join your brother Robert, the new Senator from New York.

You put your head down and work.  You support the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and are key to the passage of the Hart-Celler Act, which equalizes immigration quotas by hemisphere instead of encouraging immigration only from wealthy Western hemisphere countries.  This eventually changes the ethnic make-up of the United States and allows thousands of people to reunite with their families in America.  You do this.  This is your legacy.

You make mistakes: you support expansion in Vietnam, then change your mind.  You tell your brother not to run for president, then change your mind.  You’re in California, campaigning for him, when he’s shot in Los Angeles; you make it to his bedside before he dies.

You are 34 and all of your brothers are dead.  You have three children of your own and thirteen nieces and nephews without a father.  You decline running in your brother’s place and, instead, go back to the Senate.  You take a leadership post, but your heart is elsewhere.  You know, now, it falls to you to run.

What are you thinking, that year?  How do you function?

The answer is, badly.  You make more mistakes: terrible mistakes.  You drive off a bridge with a woman in your car, and as has always been true, you escape.  You cheat death again.  She does not.  Maybe you are dazed, maybe you are terrified, maybe you are drunk, maybe you are all three — but you tell no one until morning, when it is far too late.  Nothing can be done to save her.  This night, this bridge, this woman — they will never leave you.  People will speak of Chappaquiddick in your obituaries.  You will be forgiven by the people of Massachusetts, but no one will ever forget.  No one ever should.

This is enough. For nearly anyone, this would be enough. The narrow escapes, the horrible haunting guilt of surviving, of perhaps causing, death — it would be enough. It would be a life done, a reason to quit.

But you are a Kennedy.  You survive.  You go back to the Senate; you go back to your family.  Your son loses a leg to cancer; your wife is hospitalized for alcoholism.  Twice, you turn down opportunities to run for president as a favored candidate.  You speak of spending time with your family.  You end the decade separated from your wife, isolated from your party, bereft, reckless, ineffectual.

In 1980 you run for president, and you really learn how to lose.  It is an important lesson.  You lose to a president you don’t respect, within a party that you love and must feel you deserve to be loved by.  Chappaquiddick makes this impossible.  Your over-developed sense of inevitability makes this impossible.  Your behavior, the person you are in private, makes this impossible.  You lose, and in losing, you are more elegant than you have been in years.

But really, you are a mess.  You and Joan divorce.  You drink.  You carouse.  You return to your college habits, recklessness and abandon.  Despite being an advocate for women on the Senate floor, you are, perhaps, something of a terror for them at the bar.  You become fodder for paparazzi.  You become something of a clown.

And then, as always, you rally.  You meet another woman, Victoria, and you soon become serious.  You marry.  You fight an actual battle for your usually safe Senate seat, and beat Mitt Romney by 11 points, the narrowest margin of your career.  Maybe this reminds you of what you are there for; maybe it is just time, after all these years, to settle down.

Now you come into your own.  You spend the 90s fighting the good fight, sitting at the head of the family table, seeing the country and the Kennedys through times good and bad.  You fight for better public education and all kinds of public health care.  You inspire a new generation simply because you’ve been at it for so long.

When the end comes, it is neither swift nor sudden.  You are, after years of recklessness, not felled by something from without, but by something within.  A brain tumor.  You defy the odds.  Again, your name — your wealth, your standing — provide you a softer cushion than most, better surgeons, better hospitals — but there is only so much they can do.  You live to see a new, young president sworn in, a man who might remind you of your brothers but also, perhaps, of yourself.  You live to see him start a fight you’ve always wanted to win, but you cannot hold on to see it ended.

You die in the company of your family.  You die after a summer of sailing and singing, after a year of watching the country turn back in your direction.  You die and the papers print your praises; you die and your enemies cheer.  You have lived long, and well, and fully, and deeply.  You have been loved and loathed and have deserved both, sometimes at the same time.

You will be missed, not just for your name, not just for the legacy that is retired as you are interred by your brothers, but for the actual good you have done.  You will be missed by those for whom you fought; you will be missed by those who looked to your leadership in the darkest days as a reminder that a better America is always worth fighting for.

It’s hard to say good-bye, because you are as much an idea as a man.  So I quote, as you did, Tennyson:

Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Thank you, sir, for never yielding.

Robert Novak Is Dead

One of the greatest obituaries I have ever read — and I have read a surprising number for someone my age — is still Hunter S. Thompson’s obituary for Richard Nixon.  Titled “He Was a Crook,” it begins:

MEMO FROM THE NATIONAL AFFAIRS DESK DATE: MAY 1, 1994 FROM: DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON SUBJECT: THE DEATH OF RICHARD NIXON: NOTES ON THE PASSING OF AN AMERICAN MONSTER…. HE WAS A LIAR AND A QUITTER, AND HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN BURIED AT SEA…. BUT HE WAS, AFTER ALL, THE PRESIDENT.

This is how I feel upon the passing of Robert Novak.  Not that he was a monster, necessarily — though that argument could be made — but that now is not the time to begin making apologies. Death seems always to be the moment when it becomes OK to gloss over the worst parts of a person’s life.  That’s unfair, not just to those affected by the worst parts of the dead man’s character, but also to the dead man himself.  Robert Novak did things.  He believed in them.  They were bad.  That should not be forgotten.

It hasn’t been, if the coverage is any clue.  Even the New York Times, admittedly a competitor to Novak’s Chicago Sun-Times, couldn’t resist a kick at the end of its obituary.  So — am I particularly heartless today?  No.  He had a family, and I’m sure they loved him, and I am sorry for their loss.  I’m also sure that, had we been acquainted, well, Mr. Thompson again said it best:

Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.

Nixon laughed when I told him this. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I, too, am a family man, and we feel the same way about you.”

Robert Novak championed causes I don’t believe in.  He helmed political shows and created a style of punditry that helped make our cable TV discourse the shouting, deplorable mess it is today.  He outed a C.I.A. agent and he should have gone to jail. 

Slate makes a kinder case:

Although Novak’s incessant championing of supply-side economics and his conservative persona on CNN’s Crossfire and Capital Gang typecast him as purveyor of right-wing brain vomit, Novak’s politics were more nuanced than those of the average Fox News Channel commentator. He was a dove on both Iraq wars and expressed misgivings about the Afghanistan invasion. He supported liberal immigration, called for a global economy, and backed free trade. He gave Gerald Ford hell during his presidency, later calling him “ill equipped for the job” in his book, and he carved out a critical-of-Israel position that sharply deviated from the conservative line.

Bravo.  But who is worse — the man who supports a president because he deeply believes in his cause, or one who supports him in spite of major differences on issues like war and trade?  I think it is the man who sells his support for access.  I think it is the man who goes for the scoop over the truth.

I think it is Robert Novak.  Thompson:

These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern — but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.

Adios, Mr. Novak.  Though you will be missed, it will not be by me.

Palin’s Death Panels: Crazy, True Belief, or Watching Torchwood?

So.  I really meant to come back and comment further on the meaningful news of the day, but, well, death panel.

Death panel?  DEATH PANEL!  Really, Sarah Palin?  Here’s what she posted today on noted news site Facebook (emphasis added):

The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

^{“The Death Panel is coming!  Save me, Sarah Palin!”}

I have three theories about this.  The first is that Sarah Palin, with all of her copius free time of late, sat down and watched “Torchwood: Children of Earth” this week, as I did, but somehow missed the part where that’s all fiction.  I won’t post spoilers, but — if you’ve never seen any of Torchwood (and I hadn’t, prior to this five-hour mini-series), check it out from Netflix, then come back and let’s discuss.  (Seriously.  Message me.  I need to talk this one out.)

The second is that Sarah Palin truly believes this.  If that’s true, well, I’m glad she’s taking to the series of tubes, as they call the Internet in Alaska, to tell the world.  What troubles me is that she and thousands of her followers seem able only to forward messages like these to their closest associates, but are not able to direct these same energies toward searching out the veracity of the rumor itself.  For all of these people, and for those who love them despite getting their my-head-is-going-to-explode e-mails, I would like to introduce/remind you of two of the best inventions on the Internet: Let Me Google That For You and Snopes.  If you have crazy and/or conservative relatives, I cannot recommend bookmarking these two sites enough.  They provide quick, easy solutions to the problem of lack of thinking for oneself that seems to completely encapsulate the strategy of the GOP and their e-mail chains.

The last I’m stealing from someone else: “Maybe she’s just bat-shit crazy.”  Occum’s Razor does point me in this direction, because how far divorced from the reality of our current society must you be to believe that the current president is about to institute DEATH PANELS via a system designed to improve health care availability nationally.  Please, Mrs. Palin, point to a place on Earth with a government-managed health system where something like this has happened.  And if you’ve been using the BBC as your source, well, make sure it’s BBC News, not Drama, that you’re watching (and message me if you want to know the difference).

^{Run, kiddies!  Socialism is coming!}