Tag: jamie stiehm
Hillary Clinton Gets Stuff Done the Midwestern Way

Hillary Clinton Gets Stuff Done the Midwestern Way

As we know from prairie pioneer diaries, hardy Midwestern women could not get faint on a summer day. They had no time to admit weakness when there were quilts to sew or pies to bake for their little houses with wolves on the wind. And Mary just went blind.

Meet the Midwestern Protestant work ethic. Forget the Puritans. I mean a mighty force in the 2016 presidential election, but known to few. Hillary Clinton lives and breathes this strand of Americana, as a daughter of Illinois. Her friends and foes know it: She is a hard worker, harder than any man running for president.

“Sorry” was never a vocabulary word on the prairie. The Laura Ingalls Wilder books, based on her family, color Ma as a capable, practical woman who keeps her cool amid hardships. Laura became a schoolteacher in her teens and had to face down the big, bad boys. How plucky, crossing Main Street in a blizzard — because if you missed the other side, you were lost on the open prairie. There was no other choice to get home.

That’s the sturdy stuff Hillary Rodham was made of as a girl growing up in a Republican family in a Chicago suburb. That’s what made her fly around the world, setting a new record for meeting heads of states, as Secretary Clinton.

Stoic Midwestern Protestants are not emotive. It’s hard for them to talk much about themselves in the Southern porch style. Unlike fellow Americans on the East and West Coasts, they don’t write urbane novels or make movies celebrating themselves. We the people need to read Clinton’s Midwestern character appropriately. Then we’ll all sleep better at night.

Yes, the press is scolding Clinton for a lack of “transparency.” So what? As a journalist who knows Midwest Protestant culture, my Wisconsin girlhood steeped in it, Clinton adds up to me even as she rankles reporters who expect her to be open and to hang with them. That will never happen, though she protests she’s not “that bad,” as she put it in 2008.

After all she’s been through with her husband’s White House trials, we are like the wolves, or the locusts, or the Indian tribes Ma feared out on the prairie.

A key distinction: I am not saying Clinton is shy or reserved. Like many Midwestern Protestant women, she’s verbally forthright and often blunt to a fault. Her strong-minded kind were not raised to mince words, nor were they trained to beguile or flirt to “catch a husband.” When the former senator and first lady speaks freely among friends, her candor is a bit too bracing — as in her recent “deplorables” snafu. Clearly, she was pushing herself through exhaustion and (now we know) pneumonia.

If she were a man, she’d be praised for her grit.

When young Hillary went east for her education, she took that trait with her. Another ambitious Chicago girl did, too: Michelle Robinson Obama, a hard worker who left little to chance.

Midwestern Protestant women are amazingly strong and resilient, more so than popular culture knows.

Think of the girl stricken with polio who, as a teenager, flew off the village ski jump. Her good friend at West High was inspired to be first resident to plant a prairie garden in the village — where the Heiden Haus is named for her son and daughter, Olympic medalists in speed skating. My grandmother worked on her family’s Kansas ranch in the summer, making grub for a lot of men at light of day.

Consider Chicago. The city was burned to the ground in an 1871 blaze while the Ingalls lived on the frontier. Yet, Chicago got busy and rebuilt itself quickly — not of wood, but of a clean slate of steel. The first skyscraper was built there, an architectural paradise. You hear about “Mrs. O’Leary’s cow” as the spark, but they don’t complain or boast. Chicagoans love their city’s story and big shoulders.

Clinton was top of her class, too, just like her boyfriend, Bill. Hers was the very first women’s college class — and Yale Law School class — to catch the career trains the women’s movement created as engines of advancement.

That’s why the confident, Midwestern girl took the country by storm.

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com.

Photo: U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton greets reporters on her campaign plane in White Plains, New York, United States September 15, 2016, as she resumes her campaign schedule following a bout with pneumonia.  REUTERS/Brian Snyder

The Main Champion For Conscience: Senator Margaret Chase Smith

The Main Champion For Conscience: Senator Margaret Chase Smith

Her name was Margaret Chase Smith, a Mainer from small Skowhegan. Senator Smith to you and me, she was the first woman to run for president from a major political party.

In 1964, the Maine senator lost the Republican Party nomination to right-wing Barry Goldwater, but not the respect she carried in Congress: eight years in the House and 24 years in the Senate.

It’s easy to forget other women tried to crack that glass ceiling long before Hillary Clinton. The Democratic nominee was preceded by a class act from the other side of the aisle.

The only woman senator truly took a stand of courage on the floor, giving one of the greatest Senate speeches for the ages — on June 1, 1950.

The Declaration of Conscience speech was a winner from the day she delivered it.

“The American people are sick and tired of being afraid to speak their minds lest they be politically smeared as ‘Communists’ or ‘Fascists’ by their opponents. Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America,” Smith stated. “The American people are sick and tired of seeing innocent people smeared and guilty people whitewashed.”

The liberal Republican, always with a rose, was known as the Lady from Maine in the Senate. In fact, she was a freshman senator when she spoke out against a national scourge.

Smith knew whom she was taking on: Joseph McCarthy, Republican senator from Wisconsin, at work brewing malice and slander against so-called “Communists.” He would ruin many blacklisted lives before he was done with his witch-hunting ways.

June 1, 1950 was early days, four years before an Army lawyer, Joseph Welch, famously asked McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” Smith made the first, swift cut in grand words, knowing six or seven senators were with her. This from a woman who only had a high school education, the daughter of a barber.

The Declaration backstory has a beauty of its own. On her way to the floor, Smith rode the Senate trolley with McCarthy by chance. He noted she looked serious and asked, “Are you going to make a speech?”

“Yes, and you will not like it,” she answered. She then gave the soaring speech while McCarthy listened to every word. She did not speak his name, observing Senate etiquette. He silently left when she was done.

The Lady from Maine confronted the biggest bully in school, town and country.

The prescient Declaration resonates now in our national security state. Its eloquence won praise from Americans, notably President Harry Truman, who told the Maine senator, “One of the finest things that has happened in Washington in all my years.”

Most vivid in her speech: “I do not want to see the Republican party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny — Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear.”

John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts was a younger colleague, cutting a figure in the Senate. The New England delegation was known for liberalism and independence across party lines.

On the dark noonday of President Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas in 1963, Senator Smith laid a rose across Kennedy’s Senate desk. The desk had gone to Senator Edward M. Kennedy. He was called from the chamber when he first heard the blinding word about his brother.

As America grieved, the pressure was all on President Lyndon B. Johnson, formerly the Texan leader of the Senate. He phoned Smith in the cloakroom after the tragedy. Her personal assistant sent me this transcription. Between his Southern blandishments and her Maine reserve, affection flows.

MCS: Aren’t you kind to call.

LBJ: I miss seeing you there on that front row.

MCS: Well, come on up and see us.

LBJ: You are my sweet girl and a mighty, mighty big patriot and we think of you.

MCS: Most important at the moment. You are doing a wonderful job and want to keep on doing it.

LBJ: I am gonna do the best I can, honey.

MCS: You got an awful lot of friends up here.

Senator Smith lost in 1972 — was it age (74) or ties with President Nixon with the tide turning against the Vietnam War?

The Lady from Maine, whose elegant portrait graces the mint-green hall off the Senate floor, speaks as a champion for conscience. Always.

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com.

Picture: Wikimedia Commons.

The Summer-Ender Of 2016: Political Hurricanes And A Quarterback Tempest

The Summer-Ender Of 2016: Political Hurricanes And A Quarterback Tempest

Summer’s lease hath all too short a date, Shakespeare says. But the Bard died 400 years ago and never saw the burning summer of 2016.

I’m not even talking about the weather yet.

As August exits, two political hurricanes, named Hillary and Donald, will hit landfall to slam a thousand towns. It’s not clear which gale force is strongest. What’s clear is, the electorate is cut apart along bright lines of gender, race and class, never more polarized.

Donald Trump, new to the Republican Party, knows their dirty games like he’s been running all his life. Richard Nixon would be proud. Mocking Hillary Clinton as a “bigot” is a bit much from the man who trash-talked Mexicans and Muslims.

Yet the unforgettable presidential campaign of 2016 is young. The worst is yet to come. Elections get underway on Labor Day. That’s the tradition in American politics, with state fairs across the Midwest and pig roasts in the South. (I’ve covered one in Virginia.) Those running for office once stood on tree stumps to speak, making Abraham Lincoln loom even larger. That was a “stump speech.”

This prospect is remarkable — a politically poised woman running against a crude, obstreperous man on his first election, who gives no clue what he’ll say next. It seems more out of season because we Americans like to like presidents.

Both Clinton and Trump have severe negative ratings. Fewer than half of those polled liked either one, with Trump’s 63 percent several points worse than Clinton’s. Some say she’s lucky to have Trump, but her score is nothing to celebrate. Fervent supporters are great — which both candidates have — but it’s hard to win over people that hate you, before and after Election Day. Governing will be a challenge for either one.

It’s worth remembering the media covering the candidates — the chattering class — doesn’t like either of them. Clinton and Trump return the favor and keep the press distant and disrespected. (Reporters covering George W. Bush found him genial, which helped him win against Al Gore.) Neither likes to be questioned. It’s bad flying inside the eyes of the hurricanes.

The fall will bring a new president. But what else?

We long for autumn air and light, apples and cider instead of lemonade, ready to pick the garden’s last cosmos and zinnias. Soccer in our future. Baseball and football dramas. Weather turning.

Speaking of that, quarterback Colin Kaepernick unleashed a tempest by refusing to stand with San Francisco 49ers for the national anthem. That’s a controversy worth a real conversation. Having lived in San Francisco and Baltimore, where “The Star-Spangled Banner” lyrics were written, I felt it hit home.

Francis Scott Key, the lawyer-poet who witnessed the British bombardment of Baltimore from the water and wrote the stirring verses the next day, was handsome, rich and clever. By rich, I mean one of the wealthiest landowners in Maryland – with land worked by enslaved people. He later advised President Andrew Jackson, a ruthless slaveowner at Hermitage plantation. And his brother-in-law, Chief Justice Roger Taney, was considered the most racist chief justice in antebellum America.

First, it takes a quarterback to command the attention of white folks. It takes a quarterback with a black identity to think of such a thing — a nonviolent public protest against police brutality by not standing for the flag and the awkward anthem Baltimore ladies fought to name the national anthem. Back in 1931, Congress surrendered.

Let it be gone. I sit with Kaepernick in spirit, past and present.

Key embodies the “Slave Power” that lost a civil war for “the land of the free.” He’s on the wrong side of the work ahead to further race relations on troubled city streets, just like Baltimore’s.

Sure, let’s honor the flag and the seamstress, Mary Pickersgill, who made it in her house by the harbor. There’s always “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” or “America the Beautiful” as a new anthem superior to Key’s. Did I mention the writers were women?

Lest I forget, burning barometers, near 100 degrees for days straight on the East Coast and Florida, oppressed our puckish spirits.

So, if the Bard asked me, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”

I’d say: “Only if it’s a hurricane.”

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit Creators.com.

How The 22nd Amendment Has Hurt Democracy: A Ramble

How The 22nd Amendment Has Hurt Democracy: A Ramble

WASHINGTON — Deep in the heart of summer, things stand still here as an army of cicadas conquers the capital.

As one of those who has not fled, I’m left to wander down history’s trails, ambling up to the present.

William Jefferson Clinton’s 70th birthday on Aug. 19 struck me as a “big deal,” something he used to say. His silver mane looks like the lion in winter. How I wish he were the lion for all seasons.

His “best darn change-maker” speech for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in Philadelphia explained his wife better than she explains herself.

Bill Clinton was the best president in my life, a bringer of peace and prosperity in the 1990s. Many enjoyed his sunny exuberance, his talents in the same class as Republican Theodore Roosevelt.

Now I’m going there, a place that plunges me into angst: Why couldn’t Clinton run for president again and perhaps again?

Rascally Republicans introduced the 22nd Amendment, passed in a petty partisan flash after a different Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, was elected to four terms, from 1932 to 1944.

There was a lot going on, of course, from the Depression to the Second World War.

The greatest modern president, beloved for speaking straight to the people, died in April 1945. Two years later, Congress passed the amendment to the constitution that limits presidents to two terms, ratified in 1951. How ungrateful to FDR for saving the nation. And what profound consequences.

Surely Bill Clinton would have won in 2000, over a brash genial governor. The outgoing president was only 54, and his popularity ratings were higher than you might think. It’s hard to hold a grudge against the guy.

If Clinton were the incoming president, how much trouble we Americans never would have seen?

Walk with me into the brambles.

George W. Bush defined his presidency by the tragic Sept. 11 attacks, leading to several long wars not over yet, drawing down the treasury and military morale. Torture at Guantanamo became as an uneasy public conversation. The Patriot Act and a Homeland Security department, swiftly passed into law, created a new surveillance state.

It’s the way we live now, 15 years sunk.

Clinton may have heeded CIA “blinking red” briefings in August 2001. After 9/11, as commander in chief, he likely would have waged an Army campaign in Afghanistan. But he would not have invaded Iraq over the nefarious plot of 19 men — none Iraqi — and would not have lied about WMDs.

We’d have none of that desert storm in the sand that destroyed Iraq’s social fabric and taken thousands of lives for no good reason. And it’s safe to say ISIS would not be chilling hearts all over the world as Syria is torn apart.

The 2008 financial crisis may have happened on Clinton’s watch, but his adept skills at high-stakes moments would have forced a larger stimulus from Congress than young Barack Obama.

Clinton would have appealed to our best selves, as FDR did after Pearl Harbor, rather than fear-mongering the citizenry — or telling us to go shopping — saying inane words like, “We are here in the middle hour of our grief.”

Despite his swagger, the Texan president Bush did as bad as the hapless 4th president.

James Madison comes to mind, for August is when, 202 years ago, he let the British army burn the Capitol and the White House without firing a shot. Washington was not defended; the president galloped over the river.

A military and political debacle, “Mr. Madison’s War” went on, unpopular as it was. Madison ducked the consequences of the sacking, thanks to battle victories in Baltimore and New Orleans that had little to do with him.

Some presidents are better than others. Though Thomas Jefferson’s chosen successor chiseled the Constitution in 1787 — Madison’s fame is as the document’s father — the Virginia planter (and, yes, slave owner) proved one of our weakest presidents ever.

During my historical ramble, I asked Madison about the 22nd Amendment, and he agreed with me. Americans have every right to elect the president they want, every time they choose.

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit Creators.com.

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