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Tag: reality

Playing Washington’s Inside Game

And then there were 12.

When the 435 House members and 100 senators failed in July to agree on a long-term deficit reduction plan, congressional leaders did what they often do when they don’t know what to do: They appointed a committee. But don’t sneer, for this is — cue the trumpets — a supercommittee!

Made up of only a dozen lawmakers and perfectly balanced between Repubs and Dems, this panel is to find about $1.5 trillion in spending cuts and new revenues to shrink the federal deficit. They are to come to an agreement by Thanksgiving — how’s that for a symbolic deadline? The theory is that the group will be small enough to work together across partisan lines for the good of the country, independent of the competing budgetary needs of various groups and the demands of special interests.

The problem with theories, however, is that reality has a way of intruding on their perfection. In this case, the intrusion is literal. The 12 solons will not be sitting at the table alone, for such names as AT&T, BlueCross/BlueShield, Citigroup and GE have been escorted inside by the members. They’ll not go in physically — but monetarily. For they are among the top donors of campaign cash to the 12 budgeteers, giving them an advantage over us plain citizens.

For example, Wall Streeters have invested $17 million in the campaigns of the supercommittee’s six Republicans and $15 million in the six Democrats. That pile of political money will be a screaming presence in the negotiating room, for members will be thinking about their need to get more of it for the next election and will not want to offend donors.

By the way, one of the first decisions reached by the committee members was that they would allow themselves to continue collecting campaign donations while they decide whose programs and subsidies get cut — and whose don’t. How do you think that’ll work out? Turkeys are not the only endangered species this Thanksgiving!

This is one congressional committee that’s likely to affect your life, for it’s going to decide such things as whether to whack your Social Security benefits or cut back on Big Oil’s $4-billion-a-year taxpayer subsidy. You might have an opinion about which choice the supercommittee members should make, but can you reach any of the members personally and get a chance to bend their ear? No? Too bad, because Big Oil can. And it is.

So are insurance giants, Wall Street bankers, military contractors and other corporate powers — not only because of their big-dollar campaign donations, but also because they have some very special lobbyists who’re on a first-name basis with the members. You see, these lobbyists used to work for the 12 lawmakers on the supercommittee. In all, 109 former congressional staffers have now been hired by various corporate interests to lobby their old bosses.

General Electric, for example, has eight lobbyists on board who previously were on the staffs of supercommittee members. They include the head of GE’s Washington lobbying brigade, who had been the chief of staff for Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont. Indeed, Baucus’ Senate office seems to have been a training ground for influence-peddlers — 26 of his former aides are now lobbying him and the other 11 deficit whackers to protect the subsidies that oil, insurance and other corporations receive from us taxpayers.

As one congressional watchdog dryly notes, “It’s not like (the 12 members) are in an idealized, platonic debating society.”

Indeed not. Once again, the game is rigged for those with the money and connections to play inside. Of course, the hired guns deny any insider advantage. The former chief of staff to supercommittee member Dave Camp, R-Mich., for example, is hustling Big Pharma’s agenda, but he says flatly, “I make my case just like anyone else.”

Oh, sure — anyone else who has a top staffer-turned-lobbyist working the system for them, which leaves out roughly 99 percent of us! And they wonder why Congress and corporate lobbyists rank below E. coli bacteria in public approval ratings.

To find out more about Jim Hightower, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2011 CREATORS.COM

I Like The Real Jackie

Finally, we can hear — in her own voice, in her own words — what it was like to be Jackie Kennedy in the wake of unspeakable grief.

What a bold and generous gift to the American people.

What an unsettling development for those who want to cling to an earlier, easier version of one of America’s most memorable first ladies.

Four months after her husband’s violent death, Jacqueline Kennedy sat down with historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to record more than eight hours of interviews about her life with John F. Kennedy.

The recordings were sealed in a vault for nearly 50 years.

This month, her daughter, Caroline Kennedy, released the unedited conversations, on CDs and in book form, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of her father’s presidency.

Until now, the persistent narrative about first lady Jackie Kennedy has cast her as a whispery waft of eye candy, with impeccable taste in fashion and design and a sideshow talent for foreign languages.

Now, with the release of these recordings, some want to recast her as a shrew.

We have such demanding expectations of the women we will never be.

The New York Times got an early grab at the recordings before the official release last Wednesday. That single story, published last Monday, included snippets of her conversation. This was enough to trigger apoplexy.

Hours of reflection by a 34-year-old widow have been reduced to sound bites of bad behavior. Many of the early verdicts, rendered without making the effort to listen to the tapes or read the transcripts, are scornful.

Repeatedly, Jackie is criticized for finding no fault with her husband, whose assassination she witnessed only four months earlier. Numerous stories recount her sniping at Martin Luther King Jr., delivered in the wake of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s questionable claims to her and Bobby Kennedy that the civil rights activist spoke disdainfully about JFK’s funeral.

Other frequent mentions: Jackie called Indira Gandhi “a bitter prune” and Charles de Gaulle an “egomaniac.” She declared women unfit for politics, too.

Echoing many who rushed to uninformed judgment, the New Yorker‘s Amy Davidson wrote, “So far in these tapes, Jackie doesn’t sound all that nice.”

It is a long-held tradition in American journalism to measure political wives by their usefulness to their husbands’ ambitions. We also tend to depict politicians as either heroes or charlatans, but versions of both often reside in the same human being. In politics, even the most principled philosopher must perform at the circus. The wife is a smiling sidekick.

The supposed shock over Jackie’s less-than-Stepford responses to Schlesinger’s often probing questions reflects a stubborn commitment to the stereotype. As a columnist married to a U.S. senator, I am disappointed, but not terribly surprised, that in 2011 we still struggle so with the notion that a politician’s wife might have opinions of her own, and that not all of them are gracious.

I am also grateful to Jackie Kennedy, and her daughter, for this attempt to whittle away at one of the most enduring icons of impossible standards. What a relief to discover that she was as human as the rest of us.

Jackie Kennedy was smart and in love with her husband, despite his deep flaws. She was also capable of making withering observations about the people trying to hold sway in his life. She sounds like many bright women I know who are married to powerful men. I laughed out loud when she described how some cabinet members and senators never stop talking about themselves.

She is far more nuanced than the quick jabs going viral on the Internet. One of her opinions — that women are not suited for politics — has been quoted out of context. Schlesinger asked about her husband’s efforts to avoid permanent grudges, quoting the adage that, in politics, “there are no permanent friendships or alliances, there are only permanent interests.”

Jackie’s full response, as transcribed in the book:

“Yeah, but he never got — I mean, I’d get terribly emotional about anyone, whether it was a politician or a newspaper person who would be unfair, but he always treated it so objectively, as if they were people on a chess board — which is right. I mean, how could you if you — if he’d gotten so mad at all these people, then you may need to work with them again later. So, it’s the only way to be effective — which is one reason I think women should never be in politics. We’re just not suited to it.”

Surely, we disagree today with her conclusions, but her broader point — that women tend to take personally the attacks on those we love — still resonates.

Caroline Kennedy knew that her mother’s opinions would spark furious debate.

As she wrote in her introduction to the book, “(I)f my mother had reviewed the transcripts, I have no doubt she would have made revisions. … It isn’t surprising that there are some statements she would later have considered too personal, and others too harsh. … (H)er views evolved over time.”

Still, Caroline trusted the American public, if not the pundits, to appreciate this richer portrait of her mother.

“As her child, it has sometimes been hard for me to reconcile that most people can identify my mother instantly, but they really don’t know her at all. … (T)hey don’t always appreciate her intellectual curiosity, her sense of the ridiculous, her sense of adventure, or her unerring sense of what was right.”

Sounds like women living anonymously all around the world.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and essayist for Parade magazine.

COPYRIGHT 2011 CREATORS.COM

On Hearing The Real Dr. King

WASHINGTON — We tend to honor the Martin Luther King Jr. we want to honor, not the Martin Luther King Jr. who actually existed.

We forget the King who at the time of his ministry was labeled an “extremist,” who explicitly called out “moderates” for urging African-Americans to slow down their march to justice, who quite brilliantly used the American creed as a seedbed for searing criticisms of the United States as it existed.

The postponement of the planned ceremonies dedicating the new memorial to Dr. King did not come in time to stop the tributes from flowing in advance. This was a blessing. Debating the meaning of King’s legacy is one of the best ways of ensuring it endures — although some will always try to domesticate him into a self-help lecturer who’d be welcomed at the local Chamber of Commerce or even a Christian Coalition meeting.

That we have failed to live up to King’s calls for economic justice — a central commitment of his life’s work to which my colleague Eugene Robinson rightly called our attention — is one telltale sign of our tendency to hear King’s prophetic voice selectively. But selectively hearing him is better than not listening at all, as long as it doesn’t lead to a distortion of what he believed.

One of the many things King understood was the always incipient radicalism of the American idea. At a time when paying homage to our nation’s origins seems far more a habit of the tea party than of progressives, King, like Abraham Lincoln before him, threw our founding documents in our faces and challenged us to take them seriously.

His “I Have a Dream” speech was an extended and impassioned essay on the American promise. The civil rights movement’s demands, he insisted, arose from American history’s own vows.

“When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence,” King proclaimed, “they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the ‘unalienable Rights’ of ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.'”

One of the most dramatic moments in the speech came next. “It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned,” King said. “Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.'”

This is the wonderful paradox of King: A Christian preacher, he understood the power of rooting arguments in a tradition. But this did not make those arguments any less radical. His emphasis was on those words “insufficient funds,” on our sins against our own claims.

This focus on calling out injustice — pointedly, heatedly, sometimes angrily — is what the people of King’s time, friend and foe alike, heard. It made many moderates (and so-called moderates) decidedly uncomfortable.

Anyone tempted to sanitize King into a go-along sort of guy should read his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” from April 1963. It’s a sharp rebuke to a group of white ministers who criticized him as an outsider causing trouble and wanted him to back off his militancy.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” King replied. “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. … Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.” Yes, pleas for justice ought to be able to cross state lines.

King also declared himself “gravely disappointed with the white moderate” who, he feared, was “more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.”

And recall King’s response to being accused of extremism. Though “initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist,” he wrote, “as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label.” Jesus, he said, was called “an extremist for love,” and Amos “an extremist for justice.” The issue was: “Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?”

We have rendered Dr. King safe so we can honor him. But we should honor him because he did not play it safe. He urged us to break loose from “the paralyzing chains of conformity.” Good advice in every generation — and hard advice, too.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne(at)washpost.com.

(c) 2011, Washington Post Writers Group