Jonathan Chait is the greatest writer about American politics of my generation. Period. Case Closed. End of story. You can find indisputable proof of this unassailable fact here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here (written in 2002, when Bush looked like he would be one of the most popular presidents in history), and especially here. If you disagree with him, there is a more than 98% chance that it’s you who got it wrong, not him. He is an unassailable liberal, and like any great advocate of liberalism, free of dogmatic cant, free from apoplectic derangement, and possessing a mind unclouded by the usual high-horse resentment you get from the vast majority of the younger “liberal” punditocracy. It also helps that he’s genuinely hilarious.
It’s almost a foolhardy thing to take on Ta-Nehisi Coates when it comes to analysis of racism. Coates is one of the greatest writers in America in any field, and it hardly needs repeating that no American journalist of our time writes as powerfully when it comes to issues of race, because it’s a universally acknowledged truth. But Coates’s analytical skill is not on Chait’s level, hardly anybody’s is, and between them has begun yet another moment which I fear will tear the always fragile left/center-left political alliance asunder before it can have enough meaningful impact to truly change American life.
True to form, when the slightest fissures opened last week between the Left and the left-center, the left-of-center shrugged its collective shoulders, while the Left worked itself up into a state of hateful outrage. In the past few weeks, the Left has descended on Chait like a pack of ravenous wolves - all but writing him out as a perahia from progressive thought - painting this 42-year-old as the journalistic equivalent of an old and out of touch white privilege neo-liberal of the Clinton/Bloomberg variety who has, at best, a tin ear for modern America, and at worst is a willfully naive scion of the old guard. Jonathan Chait’s writing is the very embodiment of mainstream liberalism in the Obama era, and if his is not a sign of greater American progressivism, then neither is the entire movement of which he’s the world’s greatest spokesperson. One might as well say that Paul Ryan would be no more conservative a president than Barack Obama. A person of the Left might well believe that, but I’d like to see what they’d think after eight years of Paul Ryan. The last time the left and center-left had this argument, we ended up with the Supreme Court decision, Bush v. Gore.
Their ‘public intellectual death match’ was focused on one particular assertion - the idea that there is a ‘culture of poverty’ within the black community. It should go without saying that I am no great public intellectual, but to me the answer is so obvious as to be a non-starter. Of course there is a culture of poverty in America, and none of us should think for a second that it is unique to America’s black community. 46.7 million Americans are on food stamps. 65% of those on welfare are on welfare for more than a year, 45% for over two years, 20% for over five years. Poverty is perhaps the world’s most difficult position, and it is forgivable that so many give up on lifting themselves out of it when the road out of poverty is so horribly fraught. But so long as people are not looking for work every day, it remains a culture, and the government has a responsibility to encourage people to do what they can to rise up out of it. This is President Obama’s point of view with regard to poverty, and President Clinton’s before him, and it was President Johnson’s before them. It is out to lunch to believe that the cultural/structural/historical forces which shaped American poverty did not encourage the well meaning impoverished to give up on self-improvement and encourage others to do the same. No black man, none, is any more lacking in the virtues of virtues of family, hard work, and citizenship than those hailing from any other ‘race’ or gender. They are, however, due to forces beyond their control, tested for fealty to such concepts as perhaps no other American demographic is. The rest of us would come up just as statistically short were we subject to their trials.
But during this exchange, Coates made a particular assertion that was brazenly, almost unforgivably wrong, when he declared that there is little fundamental difference between Barack Obama’s views on poverty and Paul Ryan’s. Paul Ryan believes that the culture of poverty is to exploit the government for handouts, Barack Obama believes that the culture of poverty is to simply ‘give up.’ The latter is sympathetic to poverty’s plight, the former presumes malicious intent.
As Chait pointed out, this is simply a debate from the 1990’s, rehashed as though it was never fought. People may still be bitter about Bill Clinton’s welfare reform, which made it significantly harder for recipients to stay on it. But they tend to forget that Clinton incentivized going off welfare by raising the minimum wage and the Earned Income Tax Credit. Would that minimum wage were living wage, but Clinton’s reforms were ultimately worth the tradeoff, and lead in no small part to the most prosperous across-the-board American economy since the Nixon Administration by every meaningful statistic. Had George W. Bush (or Al Gore) continued Clinton’s policies, the economic boom may never have ended, and the prosperity for all involved would have done far more to promote American welfare than any social welfare program.
There is a culture of poverty, and nothing which Ta-Nehisi Coates argues can change this. It is in no sense unique to America’s black population, but unfortunately it affects them disproportionately. To deny that is to traffick in precisely the same politics of resentment which deposited liberalism in the political equivalent of 'bumblefuck' and allowed Conservative Republicans a clear shot to the dominance of all three branches of government for the better part of fifty years.
And this is the position where Coates went from being simply wrong to assertions that are truly unrecognizable from the Ta-Nehisi Coates of five years ago. Coates denied Chait’s assertion that America’s gradual progress on race is a sign that the African-American experience can ever be told as a (far too gradual) story of triumph and empowerment, in which African-Americans are gradually attain the opportunities denied their forerunners for so long. When Coates made this denial, a coterie of leftist bloggers crowed with victory as though Emperor Nero just converted to Christianity.
It was truly sad to see Coates descend into such misrepresentation (and frankly, into such political extremism). This point of view he suddenly espoused runs counter to everything he’s written in his extraordinary career. In the face of Chait’s invariably cool logic, Coates dissolved into the same tropes that caused a half-century of wheel-spinning. Many further left writers than Coates used this moment to hold Chait up as another manichean example of white privilege that endows blacks their rights so slowly because they view the rights of African-Americans not as a responsibility, but as a gift. If Coates really believes what he’s said in recent weeks, and if he’s right that there is no truly meaningful difference between the racial attitudes of Paul Ryan and Barack Obama, then all the progress which this country’s made is for naught. We might as well have a President Paul Ryan with all the accompanying gutting of social programs, and all the rampant banking infractions gone amok.
The ‘offending’ passage was when Chait referred to Democrats’ idea that Obama-hatred is race-based is, in his word, insane. And Chait is absolutely right. Even though there is enormous, terrifying racism against President Obama, to refer to the root of Obama-hatred as race-based is utterly blind. Unfortunately, Chait forgot to make the second part of his argument.
As he’s argued so many times before, conservative Obama hatred is still more insidious than racism. It’s idea-based, and based on the worst idea to come out of America since Manifest Destiny. That idea is libertarianism - an atom bomb of intellectual simple-mindedness, consisting in equal parts of Marxism-on-the-side-of-the-bourgeois, which looks on the idea of keeping the underclass permanently underclassed with extravagant approval; and coupled with a Nietzschean Will to Power that justifies the most immoral acts in the name of self-glorification - it is a strength-worshipping, class-based utopianism, in which the entitled are always deserving and justified; and just the kind of insane ideological delusion used by history so many times to presage every stripe of authoritarian state. To call the foundation of Republican opposition to Obama race-based is the kind of counterproductive lunacy in which only Republicans should traffick. It boxes any chance for rational discourse with Republicans into a corner from which they can only retreat into still more extreme views. It demeans the threat of Republicans' larger project, and it demeans the thousands of actual entreaties to racism which modern Republicans use.
Every election is the most important election
ever. But for me, this one is. I have far, far more invested in this election
than in 2008 – more invested in this than any election since I became a voter.
I supported Barack Obama from his primary campaign onward. John Edwards (unlike John Kerry) completely flip-flopped his positions, and Hillary lost my support around the time she implied that Barack Obama was likely to be assassinated (which was at least slightly tantamount to an incitement). But I held my nose
in the beginning until I realized that he did not give off the same noxiousness
as his most devoted followers. As Obama’s most devoted followers have long
since retreated into disappointment, I feel like I’ve had to take the place of
a few dozen of them. So let me say, without equivocation: Barack Obama is the
greatest president since Franklin Roosevelt, and may yet have to prove himself
Roosevelt’s equal.
Thanks to Obama, we do not know how close came we close to came
to worldwide cataclysm in the Bush years’ aftermath. The financial recovery is
only the beginning of the equation. Imagine if the Arab Spring had occurred
with the anti-American sentiments of the Bush years completely unrepaired –
would the Islamist mullahs now have a chokehold on Egypt, and therefore the entire Middle East? Imagine if the
Federal Government refused to pump as much money into the economy to bail out
industries – would China have to recall the debts we owe because we couldn’t
spend enough to keep their economy growing? Imagine if the Federal Government
defaulted on its credit – would we have had to spend 14 trillion dollars to
keep the worldwide economy out of a depression twice as bad as the Great
Depression?
Civilization continues to exist because of those in power who are
willing to preserve it. One bad decision can be all it takes to bring it to
ruin. We’ve come closer in the last few years to that brink than at any time
since, at very least, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and perhaps well before that. And
the fact that so few people realize that is a testament to the Obama
Presidency.
Far moreso than in 2008, the choice in this election is pellucidly
clear. I may not have agreed with John McCain on much, but he was deserving of
at least a certain amount of respect. Anyone who says that John McCain is not a
conservative is dumb, but McCain is an Aristocratic Conservative – like Theodore
Roosevelt or Winston Churchill. He's the scion of an old and
prominent American family, and does care deeply about the country’s welfare. He sees a duty to look after all Americans in the same way more principled noblemen
used to look after their serfs. It's hardly ideal, but it is a form of concern. He may not view those less privileged as
equals, but he at least sees them as deserving of protection. But whereas
McCain is an aristocrat, Romney is a plutocrat. Like Calvin Coolidge and
William McKinley before him, the term for Romney is a Plutocratic Conservative. He sees the entire
world through the goggles of entrepreneurship, and believes in individual initiative
at the cost of all else. To Governor Romney, those unable to make it in America
are neither deserving of care nor respect.
In 2008, Barack Obama merely exhibited promise. In 2012, President
Obama exhibits results. Even if the Left of the American public doesn’t realize
the extent of his triumph, the Right certainly does and will do everything in
its power to make sure his results are scaled back as far as they can possibly
take them. Contrary to popular belief, Mitt Romney is their perfect candidate.
There has never been a starker choice among presidential
candidates in my lifetime. The choice is between a candidate who believes that America
could continue upon its status quo in perpetuity without disaster ever striking
again, and a candidate who believes that America needs greater results to live
up to its first, best destiny – and with a record of staggering proof to back
up that claim.
So in the next few days, please volunteer. Please make phone
calls to swing states, please give whatever amount you can in good conscience
give to Obama campaign; and if you live close enough, please canvas in swing
states where it matters. But while it is absolutely crucial to be fired up for this
presidential election, it is equally important to be contemplative - to
keep that large impersonal survey which sets limits to the actions which our
passions inspire and to know precisely why this election is so crucial – to know
for yourself and to answer others. So in that spirit, I give you this reading
list:
….never mind that Roosevelt barely lifted a finger for black
civil rights so as to appease his Dixiecrat constituency; never mind that
Roosevelt turned a blind eye to the heinous war crimes of the Soviet Union’s
troops, never mind that Roosevelt aided military dictators sympathetic to
American interests from Duvalier to Trujillo to Chiang Kai-Shek to even Franco,
never mind that Roosevelt was perfectly prepared to collaborate with Mao in
order to subdue Japan, never mind that Roosevelt approved the firebombing of
civilian areas in Dresden and Tokyo that killed half-a-million people, never
mind that Roosevelt refused to find a place to grant immigration asylum to
millions of Jews who couldn’t get out of Europe, never mind that all Roosevelt’s
New Deal programs and fireside chats could not put eight million Americans back
to work.
And yet Roosevelt remains one of history’s most beneficent leaders.
If modern world history has a single Great Man (in both influence and morality),
it must be Franklin Roosevelt. In spite of all these awful compromises, and
occasionally because of them, he is still perhaps the greatest of all
presidents in American history. Being such a towering historical figure, his
mistakes are correspondingly grander than those of lesser leaders. But insofar
as we live in a world greater than that which existed in Roosevelt’s era, it is
the world of this particular Great Man’s creation.
When John Maynard Keynes, the great economist, was asked if
there had ever been anything like the Great Depression, he replied, “It was
called the Dark Ages and it lasted 400 years.” We currently live in the worst
recession since the Great Depression, but this recession is a mere pebble in
the pool compared to the Great Depression’s tidal waves. Like Barack Obama
after him, Roosevelt used the bully pulpit to advocate for necessary reforms,
but he never, never, NEVER advocated for a single policy before he felt the
public was ready to find it acceptable. If Roosevelt was able to advocate for
more than Barack Obama currently does, it was because the American public – and
the world – was correspondingly more desperate. Roosevelt realized that like
military surgeons, a world leader must play triage with matters of
life-or-death in order to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number of
people. Along the way to saving as many
lives as possible, many people – perhaps just as many if not more – will be
left to die.
We probably live in a climate closer to the damaged spirit
of the 1930’s and 40s than the world has ever since come, but the level of
danger is far, far lower than it then was. Merely in America, Roosevelt faced
challenges from demagogues left and right (literally), any one of which could
have wrested the reins of power from a less able leader than FDR. Consider just
one of them:
Father Charles Coughlin preached to tens of millions every
Sunday on the radio waves to broadcast that the New Deal was not nearly extreme
enough in its social programs, and that the United States needed a government
friendly to Hitler and Mussolini to stop the Communist/Jewish influence
pervading American society. In 1935 he began to organize support for a
candidacy for Huey Long that would unite the poor of the South (of all races)
with Catholics. When Long was assassinated, he attempted to form a coalition
with Dr. Francis Townsend (the pioneer of social security) to unite senior
citizens, nativists, and Catholics against Roosevelt. When that coalition didn’t
materialize, he promoted an organization on-air called the Christian Front, an
org devoted primarily to anti-semitism and the violent overthrow of the United
States government.
Many feel that Franklin Roosevelt did much more to sell his revolutionary
policies than Barack Obama has. Perhaps they’re right, but if they are, it is
because the desperation of his era enabled Roosevelt to have much more leeway
in his time to advocate for positions than Obama does in ours. For their time,
Roosevelt’s policies were far more revolutionary than Obama’s are in our own
day. The New Deal was a revolution, Obamacare is merely a restoration. Modern
liberalism and modern prosperity did not exist until Roosevelt created it,
Obama is merely trying to create its resurgence.. And because our era, for all
its problems, is so much less desperate, Obama has far less leeway to ram his
programs through than Roosevelt did without a major backlash in the voting
booth.
Furthermore, no matter how forcefully Roosevelt sold the New
Deal, there were millions of people who felt that The New Deal did not go
nearly far enough. Many millions were quite bitter that Roosevelt did not
nationalize the banks. Many of them talked of abandoning the Democratic party
for a Socialist government. Father Coughlin spoke for many millions of those
people when he said that America should make an alliance with Hitler and adapt
policies similar to those of National Socialism. But it would only be a few
years later that Roosevelt’s own Vice-President, Henry Wallace, broke with the
Roosevelt administration and said that the United States should have a strong
and completely friendly alliance with the Soviet Union. Many in America agreed
with Wallace, and felt that a Socialist government was not nearly enough. We often
forget that the Communist party in America was taken extremely seriously in the
1930’s. At their height, the American Communist Party numbered 200,000 members,
and millions more attended their meetings. At a time when 8 million Americans
were unemployed, the Soviet Union was the one country in the world that could
guarantee full employment and their staggering record of human rights abuses was
barely known to outsiders. Even those who believed in Roosevelt’s vision
greatly feared that Roosevelt did not speak out forcefully enough against those
who wished him ill. Roosevelt never took on Coughlin’s criticisms publicly, nor
did he Huey Long, or Henry Wallace. And yet it’s Roosevelt’s vision of the future
that created our world, not theirs’.
The extent of Roosevelt’s greatness is still underestimated.
For all his faults, the modern prosperity of North America, Europe, and East
Asia is his creation. And he created the foundation for that prosperity at a
time when the whole world could have easily fallen prey to Stalin or Hitler’s
designs, even America. Compared to how forcefully Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Franco, even
Churchill, DeGaulle and Ben-Gurion pursued their agendas, Roosevelt was as unautocratic
as could be. One might even argue that he was only as much an autocrat as was necessary
for America to resist the autocratic temptation. Compared to what could have
been, Roosevelt was a model of restraint. Roosevelt may have been more forceful
in his advocacy than Obama, but only because the public demanded it. Never,
never, NEVER in Roosevelt’s career did he stray an inch past the threshold which
the plurality of Americans were ready to accept.
Like Obama, Franklin Roosevelt was an utterly
undistinguished politician a mere four years before his election. For seven
years, he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy. He was chosen by Democrats as
Vice-Presidential candidate in 1924 because his cousin was the most popular
President of recent history (who was also a Republican). He was chosen to give Al
Smith’s nomination speech in 1928 because he was by then a Polio case whom many
rivals thought would be dead by 1932. Roosevelt was attractive to an American public
deperate for new air. He was unknown and charismatic, but luck brought him to
the forefront of history. Had there been no Roosevelt, there might have been
others who enacted similar reforms. As strange as it seems today to suggest
that the irreplaceable giant of the 20th century was replaceable, it’s
still possible that another Roosevelt could have arisen. Perhaps it would have
been Roosevelt’s Secretary of State Cordell Hull who designed the United
Nations, or Ohio governor James M. Cox who chose Roosevelt as his running mate
in 1924 and had a long record of progressive reform, or former Secretary of War
Newton Baker whom Woodrow Wilson handpicked as his preferred successor, or Wendell
Willkie who campaigned as the Republican nominee in 1940 on a platform of
National Unity in the face of international crisis, or President of First Union
Trust and Savings Bank Melvin Alvah Traylor who spoke out against the greed of Wall
Street, or Truman’s Vice President Alban Barkley who managed for decades to be
a Liberal Democratic senator from Kentucky. Did Roosevelt truly have the
potential to be a greater man than these other figures? Did History choose
Roosevelt to be the Great Man of the 20th century for any other
reason than a whim?
Roosevelt’s speeches were certainly important to his presidency,
but in no way were they the heart of his presidency’s success. At the heart of
the Roosevelt presidency’s success were reforms like the Glass-Steagal Act
which created a buffer between commercial and savings banks and made balance
sheets from transactions a matter of public record; or creating the Federal
Deposit Insurance Commission which could insure bank deposits, or taking
America off the Gold Standard; or the Securities Act which required acts of interstate
commerce (virtually every act…) to be registered with the government, or the
Wagner Act which guaranteed unions the right to collective bargaining, or the
Social Security Act which guaranteed people retirement pensions. At its heart
was also the social programs that provided relief to citizens like the Public
Works Administration which built the majority of the infrastructure which
America uses to this day; or the Federal Housing Administration which regulated
the standards by which homes were built; or the Resettlement Administration, or
the Civilian Conservation Corps, or the Rural Electrification Administration,
or the Tennessee Valley Authority, all of which did their part to bring modern
amenities into impoverished rural areas.
At the heart of the Roosevelt Presidency was a country so desperately
sick of Republican governance that they elected 70 Democratic Senators (and 1
Progressive) in 1935 to 23 Republicans and 322 Democratic congressmen to the
Republicans’ 103. Roosevelt’s speeches certainly helped, but what mattered far
more was that the country was ready to follow him. And Roosevelt did not need
to force the country to adapt his reforms by one iota. Had he tried, his Presidency
would have turned out very differently.
Is Obama as significant a world leader as Roosevelt? Thankfully,
no. We should be extraordinarily grateful that we don’t yet need a leader as great
as Roosevelt. But we may yet. If Obama is not a world leader of Rooseveltian
greatness, it’s probable that at very least the greatest president since
Roosevelt. Even the very best presidents before Obama – certainly Truman,
Eisenhower too, perhaps Kennedy or Clinton or Johnson or even George H. W.
Bush, merely had to act as stewards. No president before Obama had to re-establish
Roosevelt’s reforms; the best among them merely had to know enough to keep them
in place. Only Truman and George W. Bush had to negotiate the problems of a
world whose conflicts were as fraught with outcomes just as uncertain as in the
Obama era, and Obama, like Truman, has been light-years more successful than
Bush.
But had the Barack Obama we know not existed, could there have
been others who could have risen to meet the challenges of our time with
similar aplomb? Could Hilary Clinton have done it? Or Al Gore? Or Bill Bradley?
Or Gary Hart? Or George Mitchell? Or Bob Graham? Or Wesley Clark? Or Joe Biden?
Or Chris Dodd? Or Bill Richardson? Or Tim Kaine? Or Jim Webb? Or Harold Ford? Or
Andrew Cuomo? Or Elizabeth Warren? Or Deval Patrick? Or even Jon Huntsman? Or Colin
Powell? Or Christine Todd Whitman? Or hell, even John Edwards, John Kerry or John
McCain? Looking at their current records, virtually all of these people seem
unlikely to have leadership capability on par with President Obama. But what if
history had happened differently? Would we look at them differently? Would we
look at Barack Obama differently?
(A speech to impeach Nixon. Try telling me this woman did
not have the charisma to move the world.)
To me, history has one obvious example of a person who had
Barack Obama’s charisma, drive, intelligence, practical know-how, moral fortitude,
and then some. It should seem unbelievable to us that a black woman from Texas
whose lesbianism was an open secret could have been short-listed as a
Vice-Presidential candidate in 1976, but that’s precisely what happened to
Barbara Jordan. It’s possible that all which prevented her from being offered
the post was the fact that she’d been diagnosed with MS in 1973, a year after
being elected from congress.
(1976 Democratic Convention Keynote Address, Part 1. Listed by
a poll of American historians as the 5th greatest speech in modern
American history, right behind MLK, JFK, and FDR)
One of Lyndon Johnson’s final political acts before his
death was to secure Barbara Jordan’s nomination for the Democratic Party in
Texas’s 5th district congressional seat. Even after 20 years of
suffering from MS, Bill Clinton still wanted to nominate her to the Supreme
Court and only refrained from doing so because she’d also developed leukemia. Barbara
Jordan is perhaps the greatest ‘What if’ in modern American electoral history. Had
Jordan been healthy, would the election of a Black president have happened 25
years earlier? Would the election of a woman president have happened an untold
number of decades before it will? Would the election of a gay president have
been possible the full century it now seems that the American public will seem
ready for it? It seems absolutely impossible on its face. Yet why were the last
three Democratic presidents before Obama all eager to put her as far into the
public eye as possible? She was a southern Democrat, black and a moderate on
fiscal and immigration issues. As ridiculous as it seems to us today, it is
nevertheless possible that Barbara Jordan could have been elected President by carrying
the South. Is it any more ridiculous than the fact that a black man named
Barack Hussein Obama whose father was a Muslim polygamist could be elected
President of the United States seven years after 9/11?
(Same convention, same slot, even the same place – Madison Square
Garden, but 16 years later. Now an elder statesman with a body wracked by
illness.)
Obviously, Barbara Jordan never became president. But make
no mistake, she most definitely could have, and it would have sent precisely the
same inspirational message across the world which Obama’s election did. But the
very qualities which could have propelled her to the presidency would also have
required a delicate balancing act against a Republican party who could have blandished
her to a gullible public as a black racist hellbent on revenge against white
people, as a woman weak-willed against our enemies abroad, and as a lesbian
intent on pushing through a militant agenda against traditional family values. Barbara
Jordan could also have been the greatest president since Roosvelt, but it would
have required precisely the same delicate dance which Roosevelt used to perform
so brilliantly, and which Obama performs today nearly as well. She’d have been
accused by the left of selling out Democratic causes, and by tens of millions of
Americans from across the spectrum as being weak in opposition to the arguments
her opponents made.
Today, Barack Obama stands accused of precisely the same
weaknesses which of which Franklin Roosevelt was once accused. Roosevelt’s name
(along with Lyndon Johnson’s) is now used as a blunt instrument with which Obama
is constantly hit over the head for not advocating his policies forcefully
enough. Apparently, what’s needed is yet another assemblage of Sorkinian rhetoric,
and this time the world will be convinced of the moral rightness of his vision
in precisely the way they were not by his last gaggle of transcendent oratory.
What matters is results, not salesmanship. If there is no
record of good policy, there is no speech worth giving. Ultimately, Obama’s
record must speak for itself, just as Roosevelt’s did. Over time, we will see
that the Affordable Care act will enable us to reduce the national debt. We
will see that the Dodd-Frank bill will begin the dirty work of forcing banks manage
their risks. The stimulus package, the largest in history, will start remaking
America’s energy sources and improve the quality of our public schools, and unemployment is finally beneath 8%.
Al-Qaeda is virtually obliterated, the Iraq War is over, half-a-dozen Middle
Eastern dictators have been deposed, the region has not erupted into explosive
war, nor does it show obvious signs yet of doing so. Not a single one of these
accomplishments is as much as I or President Obama or any other liberal would
like to see, but it is the absolute most that could have been gotten in the
circumstances, and creates the bedrock upon which future reforms are possible.
In addition to results, there is one other quality which
matters – something without which results are not possible. Organization is
what matters. As one friend recently put it to me most convincingly, the most
important work a candidate does is not what he does on the pulpit, but what he
does when he shakes hands. It’s what his volunteers do when they knock on doors
and call people. Obama, an organizer from his earliest adulthood, understands
the importance of organization as perhaps no presidential candidate ever has.
If last night’s debate, already called the most brutal in
modern American history, proved anything, it is that Obama is perfectly capable
of advocating his positions with as much force as he requires. I firmly believe
that of all Obama’s accomplishments, his very greatest…the very heart of his
administration, is his very reluctance to stoop to the level of those in the
American government who would do their country ill. Even if Washington is still
partisan, Obama has clung to the post-partisan mantle from the beginning to the
end of his first term. No matter how hard Republicans hit, no matter how much
liberal Democrats clamor for him to strike back with full force, Obama keeps the
force of his office in check. He does this because he realizes something which
no modern American president before him seemed to realize – it is the bully
pulpit which has destroyed the US government’s ability to function. For forty-five
years, Democrats and Republicans have fought a veritable arms-race for to see
whom can stoop the lowest in partisan rancor. The race was long-since already
won, the Republicans won it with the Gingrich Revolution in 1994 and since then
have resorted to increasingly authoritarian behavior with every passing year. The
Democrats could not possibly keep up. The only hope for their vision to
recapture American imaginations is to find a way to drain the country of the
partisan poison. If the poison is not drained, then the hatred will only
increase. If the hatred increases much more than it already has, democratic
means will no longer seem like a viable option to keep the other side from
achieving power. We’ve already seen undemocratic means dictate a presidential
election when the Supreme Court voted on partisan lines to stop the Bush v. Gore
recount in Florida. How much more partisan can things get before we begin
seeing still more authoritarian means of resolving conflicts? If Obama is a great man who bestrides history, he has become one not by thumping his chest after the manner of an historical mover, but by holding the power of his office, and of his person, in unbreakable reserve.
It is only by one side forswearing the arms-race that this
track can be avoided. It may not be avoided anyway, but it is the best hope we
have. We can only hope that there are enough rational people to see that one
side is unprincipled and will do anything to be elected, while the other has
lain down there arms. If we do, then rationality will push the most
unprincipled demagogues in America to the fringes where they belong. If the American
public is not rational enough to realize this, then the 236-year-old American
experiment is once again on the verge of failing.
This morning, as is my penchant, I single-handedly attempted
the demolition of three friends’ self-esteem at a post-wedding brunch. As is
the extent of my self-delusion, I think I succeeded. The reason these friends
have lost their right to self-esteem? Their evil, malevolent, disgusting love for
Aaron Sorkin.
To the half-dozen readers of this blog, my belief in the
eternal evil of Aaron Sorkin is well-documented. I firmly believe that insofar
as a single television writer is capable of corrupting American discourse,
Aaron Sorkin has established that over and above what any other writer could
ever have done. To this day, he is the only verifiable evidence conservatives
have to demonstrate that liberalism and fascism go hand in hand. For his
genius, I shall always revere him. For what he does with his genius, I declare
open, attritional, total, and eternal war against that vile messenger of Satan.
Of course, this is (mostly) hyperbole. No artist, perhaps no
single historical actor, can move the
forces of history to the extent which I claimed above. But it says something
about my friends’ view of the world that they took what I said even 1%
seriously. History is an inexorable state of flux. Surely people can affect
history, but only History can put people in the proper position to affect it.
For over a hundred years, the modern study of History was
dominated by the ‘Great Man Theory’, which posits that only people at the top
can truly affect change. According to this theory, men like Augustus Caesar,
Mohammed, or Martin Luther created history, and in no way were they created by history – and the same goes for great
aesthetic creators like Beethoven, Shakespeare, and Michelangelo, or great scientific minds like Newton, Darwin, and Pauling. And yet by
writing history as though all that matters is the lives and ideas of such
people, all historians managed to prove was that there were many external
factors involved in the creation of Great Men. The experiences which formed
these great men mattered as much as their inborn talent, and there are many,
many potentially great men (and many more potentially great women) who did not
accumulate the necessary experiences to achieve their world-changing potential.
There was a long
while when this theory was regarded as the summit of informed opinion. It was
endorsed by thinkers as diverse as Gibbon, Carlyle, Emerson, Hegel, Nietzsche,
Kierkegaard, Spengler, Keynes, Barzun, Arthur Schlesinger, Harold Bloom, Egon
Friedell, and many lesser-known thinkers. According to these thinkers, we
lesser people are all the creation of greater beings whose thoughts create the
world as we currently understand it. It should go without saying that, at least
to an uncomfortable extent, they are right.
But they’re not completely right. Ironically, the most
famous critic of the Great Man Theory was himself one of history’s great men
who used his greatest work to rail against it. Tolstoy devoted the last 100
pages of War and Peace to a veritable polemic against the Great Man Theory –
claiming that such theories were nothing more than a medieval vestige of the
need of the hyper-religious for a god to explain their destinies. Ever the
follower of the 18th century encyclopedists,
Tolstoy had a fanatical opposition to any religious belief which smacked of
submission to authority. Like Rousseau, his hero, and virtually all the other encyclopedists, Tolstoy primary belief
was in the natural laws of nature. Since, according to Tolstoy and Rousseau, it
is systems of rule which keep mankind from fulfilling his ultimate potential, it
follows that no man is greater than any other. In the correct circumstances,
any uneducated peasant can contribute as much to the growth of society as the
best educated nobleman (like Tolstoy).
As so often happens in philosophy, both schools of thought
are absolutely right, and absolutely wrong. In recent decades we have seen the
virtual collapse of the Great Man theory in university teaching. In an era when
the study of critical theory is so prized, how can such an old-fashioned notion
of biographical ‘Great Man’ history survive in an age of Marxist history,
deconstructive history, sociological history, feminist history, - all of which
share a similar intention of overthrowing the top-down, Great Man theory and
all of its forgetfulness of those who suffered underneath the great men.
I don’t think many historians of a generation ago would have
predicted that the Great Man theory would come back with such force into today’s
discourse. But even if the Great Man theory isn’t true (and it isn’t…), it’s
apparent that people need the theory of ‘Great Men’ in order to make sense of
today’s world. Without it, history is a dry series of micro-speculations that is
far too speculative to make an over-arching narrative. Therefore, the study of
history becomes an ass-backwards proposition. The paradox of history is that to
properly ascertain how history happened, we need scientific reconstruction, not
a narrative recreation. But if events are reconstructed with all the precision
of science, history becomes a nearly useless exercise. There are far too many
historical events to exhaustively analyze them all with the precision of
science and data entry. If such a project were attempted, there would be no
point to history. Very little could be learned from it because it would only be
a dry series of speculations that has very little bearing on people’s
understanding of the world. What matters in history is not the detail but the
sweep. It is the narrative of history that matters, and a proper understanding
history’s narrative will always involve an artfully approximate guesswork, not
any precise science.
Even if we’re mindful not to, we all assign superhuman
qualities to the ‘titans’ of history, qualities that have very little to do
with who these people really were, what they did, and how the world made their
accomplishments possible. We can’t help it. History is too large to be
understood. Therefore, there is an overwhelming temptation among thinking
people to ascribe all the history which we experience in our own time as paling
in comparison to the accomplishments of past heroes and villains.
The example given this morning was, of course, Barack Obama,
and how his refusal to use the bully pulpit for great achievements makes him
pale in comparison to an historical figure like Franklin Roosevelt – who allegedly
never stopped using his position as the leader of the free world to advocate
for good. Never mind that Roosevelt placed 200,000 Japanese-Americans into
internment camps rather than using the bully pulpit to stand up for their
rights, never mind that Roosevelt refused to bomb the railroad tracks to German
death camps rather than confront those who would accuse him of being controlled
by a Jewish cabal; never mind that Roosevelt would never have ordered America
to enter World War II without the bombing of Pearl Harbor, never mind that Roosevelt
gave into to conservative clamoring to balance the budget and thus prolonged
the Great Depression by four years; never mind that he thought he could make
Stalin relinquish control of Eastern Europe and what would eventually become the
Soviet Bloc…
I'm sure you're extremely busy right now. But I do want to write you to say that while I was very moved by your second day Rosh Hashana Sermon (minus the first five minutes...I had to listen from outside), I have to take very real issue with one of your sentiments. One that I think may compromise how you're remembered by your congregants and their children. I agree with you that we live in a time of excess and extremes. But I see the extremes as coming from one side of America, not the other. And I think in ten years you may have no choice but to come around to that point of view as well.
I'm not a typical educated member of my generation. I consider myself a liberal, but I'm not a member of the left. I consider myself in the center, and it's because I'm in the center that I see liberal democrats as the only possible option. I realize that this is in part a generational perception, but please consider how my generation grew up. When we were in high school, we watched as Newt Gingrich insisted on shutting down the government rather than compromise on the Federal Budget. We watched as President Clinton was impeached for perjury after lying on an inconsequential issue that he should never have been made to testify about in the first place. Our first voting election was decided by the Supreme Court on partisan lines to stop a recount after the very real possibility of election fraud in Florida. We were just college students when 9/11 occurred, and we later heard from Richard Clarke that George Bush did not take the threat seriously enough to take very simple measures to prevent it. We were of draft age when the Iraq War happened, a war of choice for which we all eventually learned there was no discernible objective. We experienced a second election in which there was a possibility of election fraud in Ohio that was never pursued. It is entirely possible that in a century, historians will look at the 2000's and say that it was an era that was ruled by a Coup d'etat.
Were I of your generation, I'd have looked at the riots of the sixties, the rise of Goldwater and Reagan on one hand and the rise of McGovern and Jesse Jackson on the other and concluded that moderation was the only sensible option. But I'm not of your generation, and it's because I believe in moderation that I have to place blame and say that there is no moral equivalence between the Republicans and Democrats. To say otherwise is just as untrue as to say that there is moral equivalence between the Palestinian government and the Israeli one.
There is no extreme left in this country that bears mentioning. There is a single socialist senator (Bernie Sanders), there's no talk of nationalizing industries, no serious talk of allying with Hugo Chavez or Mahmoud Ahmedinejad against their antagonists, no talk of raising taxes for the rich beyond 35% of their income (compare that to the 1950's, when there was a marginal tax rate on the rich of 94%, and this was during the Eisenhower administration!). Real leftist figures like Jesse Jackson and Dennis Kucinich are marginal figures in the Democratic Party, whereas Paul Ryan is the vice-presidential nominee for the Republicans. Every time a leader of your generation laments that there is a decline in bipartisanship and says that both sides are equally responsible, you are aiding and abetting the decline of Democracy in America.
I know that your advocacy of bipartisanship and reservations about Obama are in large part due to Israel. But Obama realizes one thing that Bush never did, which is that if Israel is to survive into the 22nd century, it must be saved from itself. The Israeli Knesset is for all intents and purposes a right-wing supermajority, and the only thing preventing them from launching full-scale attacks on the Iranian nuclear program is Obama. To attack Iran or anywhere else in the current political climate would be to invite a potential apocalypse on Israel. Any chance the Arab Spring has of working would immediately be crushed and Radical Islamists who preach the destruction of Israel would sail into victory, each of which might try to build a similar nuclear program. Even if Iran doesn't build a bomb, they can simply order one from Pakistan, and if Pakistan has a radical Islamist government, they'll be more than happy to provide whatever amount of nuclear weapons Iran would like to have. We probably disagree about Obama's position on the settlements - I don't think he believes for a moment that peace will be achieved if only Israel withdraws from them. But in order to appease these very volatile places, he has to say he does. I'm not a dove because I don't take the threat of Israeli security seriously, I'm a dove because I think hawks don't take the threat to Israeli security seriously enough.
Many people of your generation lament that the American idyll of the mid-20th century is no longer there. But my generation never knew that world. We have to deal with the reality of a world we'll be living in for the next half-century. And for the moment, the reality is that there is one party that is the party of democracy, and one party that is the party of authoritarianism and corruption. Liberals want a partner in peace, but there is no partner in peace.
Shana Tova to you and your family, I know your Yom Kippur sermons will be just as wonderful,
I'm not someone who is much inspired by political rallies. I watched the Obama rallies of 2008 in something like stone silence - expecting that nearly everyone who fell in love with Obama so quickly would fall out of love just as quickly. In 90% of the cases, I think I was right.
But what I did not expect was that I would fall in love, and that my devotion to Obama would be more fervent than any I've experienced for a political figure in my lifetime - and perhaps any I will experience again. When Obama took office, I think I had a more than 50% expectation that his administration would fold under the weight of the expectations, opposition, and irredeemable partisan hatred. And yet, here he is, four years later - dragging America by the scruff of its collective neck into the first world that we created then fell so far behind.
Imagine, for a moment, that the Great Recession had occurred a few years earlier. George W. Bush would have used it as an opportunity to lower taxes yet again, increase funding on his pet programs and cut social programs to next to nothing. Even after cutting social programs, the debt may have spiraled out of control still more, with no more money to pay for an economic stimulus. We may well have completely defaulted on our credit, driven away all foreign investment, and sent unemployment to levels unseen since the Great Depression, or still worse.
Yet still there would have lurked Karl Rove from the sidelines, finding ways to blame Democrats yet again for something only conservative Republicans would be stupid enough to get us into. America would have had the Tea Party a few years earlier, only it would have been more virulent, with more occasion to be stirred into anger, and with the power of a president in tow. God knows what might have happened next.
Without a figure like Obama to rise when he did, I believe there is very nearly a certain chance that America would have fallen into permanent, irreversible decline. Even with an Obama presidency it may yet happen. But Barack Obama has turned out to be that last, best hope we have for stemming the tidal waves brought on by the Bush years.
This election has been far, far harder for me to watch impartially than 2008 or any election beforehand. It is the first election of my lifetime in which I truly, truly believe in a candidate. I do not expect to be this inspired by a political convention again for half a century (if I make it that far), and I feel a little ridiculous that I'm inspired at all. Still, this was last, best evidence that the America's wounds from the sixties have healed. The Democratic party is no longer the party of special interests and narcissistic rebellion. As it was in its heyday, it again is the party of concern for actual people.
In four years, Obama has accomplished more than Bill Clinton would have in sixteen. He staved off a second great depression and kept America's most important industry (auto) afloat when it could so easily have collapsed. He passed something approaching the universal healthcare law that eluded every president for over a hundred years. He inspired hundreds of millions in the Arab world to rebel against their dictators, and has played diplomacy so deftly that the region has not blown up into total war in spite of its explosive instability. He achieved the objectives of the Afghanistan War, and ended the Iraq War, for which there were no objectives. When it came time to prevent a mass democide in Libya, he formed exactly the sort of cooperative multi-national coalition which the Bush administration should have formed for Afghanistan, but didn't. By preventing an attack on Iran in such an unstable climate, he's done far more for Israeli security than Bush ever did. Nuclear stockpiles have been reduced, hate crimes are easier to prosecute, women are paid more, gays can serve openly in the military and it's only a matter of time before they will be allowed to marry freely.
It's not enough, but it's much more than we had four years ago. He did all this at a time when so many backward thinking people pined for his failure. Now more than ever, it is clear that we're living in extraordinary times. Most of us in America will eventually wake up to the fact that we were fortunate enough to be protected by a great man at the very moment we most need protection. And thanks to Obama, he may well be the last great man before great women take the stage to do the same (Elizabeth Warren?).
Nearly everybody who reads this, particularly me, is too
young to remember the 1968 riots at the Democratic convention. But there is not
a single event in modern American history; not the assassinations of the 60’s,
nor the Moon Landing, nor the Iranian hostage crisis, nor the fall of
Communism, nor Bush v. Gore, nor 9/11, nor either the Vietnam or Iraq wars;
which define everything in America which happened afterward more clearly than
the 1968 Democratic convention.
As all conservative movements do, the conservatives of the
late 60’s gained traction by promising a return to rule of law. From 1968
onward, Republicans have used variations on the exact same narrative that began
at the 68 convention: “If Democrats cannot keep order within their own party,
how can they keep order in their country, or in the world?’’
How could an event that seems so trivial to us today, like it
happened in a distant solar system, have defined so much history afterward? People
of my age can’t remember a time when Democrats were utterly confident that they
were on the side of progress. The New Deal, the liberation of Europe, the Fair
Deal, civil rights marches, the New Frontier, the Great Society, – this is all abstract history to us. But by
1968, it was utterly clear to many that the Vietnam War was wrong and that
America was on history’s wrong side. After thrity-five years of unbroken moral
certainty in the rightness of their causes, the Democrats faced an agonizing
crisis of identity and were rent into multiple parts. How similar this feels to
today’s republicans… In the case of fifty years ago, however rightly so many
Democrats may have felt to splinter the party as they did, it damned liberals
to nearly half a century of unbroken conservative rule.
Unbroken conservative rule?... Yes, unbroken.
Even when Carter or Clinton was president, theirs were
presidencies whose possibilities were dictated by the demands of conservatives.
They were southern governors, elected because their policies were palatable
enough to the conservative base of the south to siphon off some of their more
moderate voters. For all his later progressivism, Jimmy Carter was a southern
governor quite late to support civil rights. One of his most significant policy
decisions was deregulate the airline industry. The biggest decrease in capital
gains tax came from the Carter administration – 49% to 28% in 1979.
Until Obama, Clinton was the only unambiguously successful
Democratic president for the last half-century. There were far more liberal
gains under Clinton than under Carter, but also far more liberal compromises. In
order to pass the Brady bill that allowed for background checks on people who
bought handguns, he had to sign two other crime bills which allowed for sixty
new death penalty offenses, eliminated Pell Grants for prison inmate education,
mandated that communications companies modify all their equipment so that
federal agencies would be able to monitor whatever they wanted. To pass the Lobbying Disclosure Act which forced
lobbyists to report their activities, he had to also sign the Interstate
Commerce Commission Termination Act, which got rid of a useful organization to
regulate business. The list of laws Clinton passed and signed goes on and on,
and they inevitably follow a pattern of a major liberal gain followed by a nearly
as major conservative compromise. This – and impeachment – was the price of
success.
(Barbara Jordan… what a shame that America wouldn’t elect a
lesbian black president forty years ago.)
I was ten years old when Bill Clinton was nominated for
president in New York, and as I was riveted to the coverage from my parents’ bedroom
- vaguely but unmistakably thrilled by the sweep of an American history still
beyond my understanding - I vividly recall their astonishment that Democrats
were having a convention that went off without a hitch.
We like to pretend that modern conventions mean nothing –
that the candidates are already elected through the primary process, it’s all
just empty theater, and have absolutely no bearing on what happens in an
election. In a certain way, this is correct. It is utterly empty theater, but
because it’s empty theater, it’s all the more revealing than it ever was in the
days of fraught, uncertain, conventions. By watching, we now know the
priorities of each party, and we now know their competence at enacting their
priorities. Because of the Republican convention, we now know that Republicans aren’t
competent enough to stop an old man from yelling at a chair for fifteen minutes
in primetime. And by watching yesterday’s convention, we know that Democrats
are finally ready: Not only to believe again in the moral rightness of their
party, but to persuade the country at large of that moral rightness.
Something miraculous is happening on television this week –
a deliverance for which liberals have longed for half a century. The
Republicans have already made their case for maintaining a conservative status
quo, it was a bad case, and it’s now entrusted for the homestretch to an
incompetent candidate. Republicans still may win, but it's not bloody likely now. It is the liberals’ turn to make their case, and Democrats
can now articulate it with a force unseen since the days of John F. Kennedy.
What is amazing about this convention is that for the first
time in my lifetime, in the lifetime of my whole generation, there is a liberal
cause being articulated on primetime television - it's not being articulated perfectly; there are some errors in facts here and there which you can find on any factchecking sight, but it is a much greater case than conservatives have ever made. Every liberal should tune in
immediately, because an unapologetic case is currently being made on national
television for the benefits of government – for corporate regulation, for
collective bargaining, for conservationism, for investment in education, for immigration
amnesty, for women’s equality, for American labor – and it’s being made for the
first time in our lifetimes. It’s being made better and more articulately than
we’ve ever heard it, and made with the confidence that Americans are listening.
If you’ve wondered when the case would be made these past four
years for liberal principles, turn on the TV tonight for Elizabeth Warren and
Bill Clinton, and all night tomorrow night. The leash has been taken off.
Nearly every major Democratic party spokesperson is on television instead of
Obama operatives, finally finding the perfect moment to take the liberal case
to the nation and speak their minds as liberal politicians have not in an
entire generation. The Democratic party is a true party again. When will liberals
stand up for themselves?
The following is a transcript, provided to us only through
the deaths of thousands of agents, from the super-secret, booby-trapped
fortress of nonitude in the bowels of the Supreme Court building. It is a
gigantic, super-secret stone room; not unlike like Westminster Hall in London,
adorned with nine thrones, four of which are occupied by Supreme Court Justices
Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, and Alito, and five of which are currently empty as
Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan are trapped in nets on the room’s
floor next to their thrones. All justices are dressed in their courtroom robes.
Breyer: You’ll never get away with this Scalia!
Scalia: Oh but I already have! Don’t you see that without Obamacare,
most people will only be free to choose between one health insurance plan and
another which they cannot afford? People will either have to die or accrue
massive personal debts to their providers which will then become the
responsibility of their banks to repossess more assets than most people have,
thereby forcing the federal government to bail them out yet again! I claim Obamacare
as something not stipulated by the original constitution, but in fact I’ve done
it only as a way to hold the power of the free market in the palm of my hand!
MUHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Kagan: You’re mad! Mad I tell you! Mad!
Ginsburg: But that’s not the power of the free market. The
free market means that banks should be allowed to fail. What you’re describing
is socialism for the rich!
Alito: And that’s the genius of it. We tell everyone that an
uninhibited free market is the American way and only a totally free market can
function by itself, and when it fails, we simply say that the market wasn’t
free enough! And then corporate hacks that bankrolled our early careers at
thinktanks and foundations and give us millions of dollars worth of comped vacations for speaking tours can get more
money from the government!
Sotomayor: You dastardly fiends!
Thomas: Indeed. And besides. That’s what HE wants.
Ginsburg: (squirming) Who’s he?
Scalia: (to Alito and Thomas) It’s time. (takes a remote
control from out his pocket with a single large button. Pushes the button and next
to him rises Anthony Kennedy from beneath the floor)
All Four Liberal Justices: KENNEDY!
Sotomayor: It was you all along!
Kennedy: HA HA HA! Yes, I play the squishy swing vote
justice for publicity’s sake, but it is I who make the absolutist civil libertarian
argument that an individual mandate inhibits free choice! The American public should
be free to make whatever shitty choices we provide them with! And if they die
from lack of health care, then those morlocks should have thought of that
before they elected Republican presidents in seven of the last eleven presidential
elections!
Breyer: The American people aren’t morlocks!
Roberts: Sure they are! Look at section 5, line 197 of John
Marshall’s majority opinion in Marbury vs. Madison. It says plainly, ‘The
American People are Morlocks.”
Kagan: No it doesn’t!
Where did you study law?
Roberts: Harvard! The same place as you…or did I go to Yale?
Anyway it’s one of the two places at which we all studied.
Ginsburg: I graduated from Columbia!
Everybody else: RETARD!
Kagan: The American people are not morlocks! I hereby summon
the spirit of John Marshall to testify. Liberals, get out your rings!
(the four liberal justices take out their plastic Rings of
Purposive Interpretation with giant red fiberglass jewels in the middle, put
them on their left ring fingers and raise their left arms in the air)
Liberal Justices: LIBERAL JUSTICES ACITIVATE! JOHN MARSHALL!
(the spirit of John Marshall, or something that looks vaguely like David Souter in a powdered whig, appears on a giant television in a blueish, holographic
tint)
Ghost of John Marshall: John Glover Roberts Junior! I am the
spirit of Chief Justices Past, from John Jay to William Rhenquist, and we have
been keepers of the greatest secret of all. It is time that you know the great
secret of the American people: the American People are idiots, not morlocks! You
must take solemn oath that you shall guard this secret until your dying breath.
(starts fading away) Remember your oath! REMEMBER!!
(the hall echoes with John Marshall’s last word.)
Roberts: The American people are not morlocks? Well then
everything I’ve ever known is wrong!
Scalia: No, no it’s right Roberts.
Roberts: All those years working as a private practice corporate
shill, just because I thought that I was helping them make money off morlocks,
not human beings!...
Alito: Please no, no, NOT LIKE THIS!
Roberts: If I vote to strike down the individual mandate by
a 5-4 margin, I’ll be the chief justice who approved the early deaths of
millions of American non-morlocks. I can’t let this happen. I switch my vote!
Kennedy: It can’t be! No! NOOOOOO I’M MELTING! MELTING! OH
WHAT A WORLD!
Scalia: You're not gonna melt, you’re just a drama
queen.
Kennedy: WHAT A WORLD! (runs out of the room)
Scalia: I guess we should free the liberal justices now. No sense in lording it
over them anymore.
Alito: You realize he's going straight to George Will to leak.
Scalia: Yeah, I guess that means our super-secret fortress days are over. We could probably make up the millions we'll lose in comped vacations and speaking tours by selling this room on e-bay. Anyhow, Clarence help me get the liberals out of these nets.
Clarence Thomas: Sure thing Nino. (whispering in Sotomayor’s
ear): psst. I’m not wearing any pants!
