Ten moments that have
brought us to where we are.
By John Crawley
This essay is a big
thing to digest. I was going to publish it in bite-size portions, but decided
not everyone eats at the same speed. So here is the whole meal. Enjoy it and
feel free to return to it as often as you like. I promise that the destination
is worth the journey.
Introduction:
There is a practice in America today of Punitive Politics: getting
even through power.
It is deadly.
It is dangerous.
And it is dividing our country into camps that refuse to
compromise and meet halfway. Punitive Politics is destroying the fabric of the
democracy. I believe I have found the ten moments in our recent history that
have led us to this destructive path.
You, by no means, have to agree with my selection of the top
ten moments that have molded our political debate into the firestorm it has
become. They are arguably the moments that have set us up to be the society
that we are today– right or wrong, agreed or disagreed, these ten moments
capture the most disagreeable and castigating nature of a people.
To be sure, these ten have anchored to them five or six
other moments each that have also shaped our country. And many are over lapping
and just as important. But I wanted to narrow it down to ten for focus reasons.
Too many points and people’s eyes begin to glaze over. We have the top ten in
football, basketball and Miss America, so I think the top ten moments of our
recent history could well play into the hands of those with short attention
spans– myself included.
These ten moments could well have stretched back as far as
our Civil War, but I chose to look at recent history to glean from it, the
directions we have taken and why. The Civil War affected (and still affects) many
of the points on this list. But it is past. I gave myself the beginning of the
20th Century as a place from which to start. World War I and the
Great Depression could have made the list, and of course World War II. But none
of these things alone, changed our discourse as a people. If anything, they
united us for a brief time with common causes. The Great Depression gave birth
to the Social Security Act, that, as a moment, changed the way in which we
thought of government and society. So I have decided to start there for the
thesis of this exercise.
Two friends who advised me with this article suggested the
dropping of the atomic bomb and the bringing down of the Soviet Iron Curtain.
Both hugely important on a global basis and for balance of power, but I do not
believe either actually changed who we are as a people.
Then both of these friends separately and emphatically
believed that the election of Barrack Obama, the first black President of the
United States, should be one of the moments. I spent a long time considering
their plea in this case. Even though his election was important and a pivotal
point for many in our nation, I rejected it for two reasons. A) There would be
a racist overtone to the discussion that I didn’t want to fuel. I think it is
there – I feel it lying just under the surface as a subtext to many arguments
against his administration, but I do not believe it is the cause of the rancor.
The hard feelings where there long before Obama became the Commander-in-Chief.
People hated Gore, hated Nixon, hated Reagan and hated Clinton and none of them
were black. There are people who hate Obama because he is black, but it does
not define us as a nation. It does define a few red neck racists. B) If people
feel that he should not be President because of his race, or because of his
policy, then they have the option to vote him out of office and replace him
with someone else. That is how democracy works. So there is an immediate
resolution to the problem of having a black, liberal President. Get rid of him.
By contrast, the moments I have written about here have lingering consequences
that I do not believe the color of President Obama’s skin has.
The problem is, white or black, the same fissure divides us.
So the race of a President is not the missing ingredient. It is, to be sure
fuel for the fire, but within itself is not one of the moments of which I
write. If Obama’s election is a moment,
then it is an outgrowth of the civil rights moment that is discussed here. But
I do believe that if Condoleezza Rice had been elected President, both her race
and her gender would be ingredients for someone to have a problem with.
Therefore, I think that is a personal problem someone will have to struggle
with and is not one of the defining moments of us as a people.
The ten I picked, I do believe, molded us into the country
we are today and are in part and parcel responsible for the rancorous direction
our country is taking.
These ten moments have led to the bickering, the
inhospitable dialog and the stalemate in which America finds itself. These ten
are both hero and culprit in the way in which they are interpreted and the way
in which people, not professional historians, view them. From and
anthropological point of view, these ten are the shapers of the argument–
perhaps, not the argument themselves, but rather they are the volatile matter
that goes into the cocktail which has become so vitriol in our society.
The Ten Moments are:
Passage of the Social Security Act
Vietnam War and Resistance
Civil Rights/Voter Rights Acts
Watergate and the Impeachment of Richard Nixon
Roe v Wade
Iran Hostage Crisis
Trickle Down Economics
The Monica Lewinsky Scandal
911
Affordable Heath Care Act
So who are we? What are we?
And how did we get this way?
We are a country divided now as deeply as we were during the
1860’s over slavery. Our ideology and discourse is as acrimonious as ever and
we have stopped listening to the other side; instead, we merely point the
fingers at them and say they are either idiots or they are un-American. It all depends
upon which side you are standing at a given moment. But the problem is them.
They caused it.
Who is the ubiquitous they?
Anyone who disagrees with you. Anyone who takes another side that causes
your side not to win – anyone who supports a candidate and a cause, which you
do not believe in or have the profession of faith in. Both sides have become
entrenched in a religious state of “we are right and they are wrong”. Period. No questions asked and no prisoners
taken.
Pick a topic: slavery, gun rights, abortion, death penalty,
immigration control, government spending, healthcare, equal pay, equal rights and
the list goes on – it doesn’t matter. The lines are drawn and there is no
backing down and no crossing over. Instead of the Blue and Gray of the Civil
War, we now have the Red and Blue of the Ideological Wars. But the divide is
just as real as anything that the Mason Dixon Line separated a century and a
half ago.
We the people, is no longer a concept. Now it is we (the
people who believe like I believe) are the solution. The only solution. There
is no reason to listen to the other side.
The other guy’s ideas are seriously and dangerously flawed. They are wrong.
And if they win, it
is time to get even.
That’s America today.
Chapter One
The Social Security Act
My parents came of age during the Great Depression. They had
little. Times were lean; the means to provide for a family was paper-thin. Life
savings had been wiped out. Fear ran rampant in the streets. There were bread
lines. There were work lines. There was a myriad of unemployment lines. And for
the start of the Great Depression, there was little, if any, safety net for the
American Worker and his family. Very little.
Then came Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The fist of the ten
moments was Roosevelt’s passage of the Social Security Act, giving a safety net
to millions of Americans for the first time.
Along with Social Security came work programs, CCC. CAA. WPP. If it had
an initial and put people to work, Roosevelt championed it. It was less about
the money, he told aides, but more about giving a man back his dignity by
allowing him to work.
But even in those early days, there arose the Archie Bunker
mentality (mostly from the opposition party who had left the country
floundering in debt and depression) that
Roosevelt was turning America into a socialistic nation. Under his guidance, we
would soon be a commie land, full of pinkos and socialists and the American
Dream would be gone forever, replaced with the teaching of Karl Marx and worse.
America saw the rise of the John Birch society, the
Hollywood black list and the rise and return of the Klu Klux Klan, as well as
witch-hunts across the land looking far and wide for signs that socialism was
creeping in, just slightly ahead of and leading the way for its big brother,
communism.
And it was all based on the fear that the great social
safety net that FDR spread out before the country – Social Security– was the
first step in destroying America, by taking away the country’s freedoms.
But it was also the first step seen by others as the way in
which to build America into the future. With the government leading the way.
The Federal government paving the metaphorical roads taking us into tomorrow. Spending
and lots of taxation to fuel that spending would lift us out of the depression
and beyond our selfish and greedy nature – the very nature that had led us to
the brink of disaster with the fall of Wall Street and the destruction of the
U.S. banking system.
Keynesian economics stepped to the forefront with
monetary control of business cycles and individualism and its hero, Ayn Rand
took a step back. The shift became
formalized as Washington began more programs to protect the public with
controls over banks, businesses and public institutions with regulations and
centralized control. Washington wasn’t going to let a great crash happen again.
Washington was going to provide a safety net. Washington was going to be the stopgap.
And so, the division was laid –between those who wanted a
liaise faire, individualistic approach to society and those who looked to
institutions for increased role in shaping our lives, especially the federal
government. Of interest, at this time, as never before in the history of the
country, institutions such as labor unions and churches showed tremendous
growth, so the group concept of collectivism, wasn’t just related to Washington
and government, but rather it permeated society as a whole.
Social Security was the lynch pin – the keystone to the New
Deal. Society would forever have a safety net. The future would be protected.
And following the Social Security Act came many other acts aimed at protecting
the American way of life. Welfare and
government backed assistance loans, banking rules, FDIC insurance
for deposits, The Security and Exchange commission’s reinvigorated control of
stock trading and leveraged borrowing for large block stock buying. The eye of
Washington began to scrutinize more carefully, the goings on of commerce in the
United States. The free-for-all was over. Now it was going to regulated for the
good of all.
And with this ever-increasing scrutiny, came rumblings from
the likes of the Chamber of Commerce and other conservative organizations that
FDR had gone too far in inserting Washington into the daily business of America
and Americans.
He was called traitor, villain and even Un-American. But he
had something happen that turned the country back to him: Pearl Harbor.
World War II resurrected Roosevelt as savior and leader and
the right wing propaganda machine was lost in the washout of the war and its
aftermath. By that time Social Security was a part of the fabric of American
life. And Roosevelt himself, the great big target with the huge bulls eye on
himself, was gone. A populist by the name of Harry Truman took over the White
House and our emphasis as a nation turned to stamping out foreign intruders
coming ashore. Real intruders from real countries, not ideologies hidden in
Aunt Wilma’s Leftist closet.
We were entering the Cold War. But even as communism from
abroad raised its ugly head, the rumor mill on the right once again began to
churn and several remnants of the old order took up the new cause.
Welcome to Washington Joe McCarthy who believed under every
bed in America there lurked a communist. As outlandish as he became, McCarthy
had a huge following. In fact, the wilder his claims became, the more popular
he became. (Reminds one of Rush Limbaugh, no?)
It took Edward R. Murrow and the Senate Army hearings to
finally turn McCarthy back out to pasture. And America settled down to wait for
their next big moment in history.
But the damage had been done. The social safety net was
poisoned. Social Security was forever branded by the Right as evil and
dangerous to the America principle of individualism.
Chapter Two:
Vietnam War and Resistance
The Domino Theory goes like this. You set up dominos end-to-end
and push one down and they all start to fall in order, one-by-one until they
have all fallen.
That, according to hawkish advisors to Eisenhower, Kennedy
and Johnson was what was going to happen in Southeast Asia unless America
intervened and stopped Ho Chi Men from taking over that corner of the world.
Without the aid of America, the balance of power in that dark jungled nation and
then other nations around it would fall into the hands of the communists.
There would be no stopping the Red Menace if we failed to
win in Vietnam.
The Domino Theory. Eisenhower didn’t buy into it. He warned
Kennedy about it at the transition of power and then the young President
totally forgot what the old general had told him and put America on the path to
one of its darkest wars in our country’s history. Soon, JFK saw the error in
his ways and was about to pull the plug on the CIA activity in Vietnam, when
the Cuban Missile Crisis averted his attention. And while that was going on, we
assassinated (or had him assassinated) the president of South Vietnam, because
he was beginning to talk about possible negotiations with the North.
The people who believed in the Domino Theory, wanted no part
of negotiating with the North.
On the streets of Dallas, power in our own country was again
transferred, this time by the bullet instead of the ballot. And it handed to
Lyndon Johnson the reins of power and the Domino Theory was alive and well
again.
Build up after build up. Bombing run after bombing run. Billions of dollars on top of billions of
dollars and still there was no real progress in the swamps and rice paddies of
Southeast Asia. To be sure, on nightly news the anchors of the day reported the
figures the Pentagon manufactured as for the kill rate of enemy combatants. But
the troops from the North kept coming.
And before long, the students who were being drafted into
the long, endless battle began to protest on the college campuses. And protest
loudly.
Enter into the fray a Presidential election that featured
cold war warrior, Richard Nixon. He saw the anti-war movement as anti-American.
He won. He increased the troops. He increased the carpet-bombing.
He raised taxes to pay for it all. Most American went along with it. But a
radical fringe began to push back. And push back violently. Hippies were dirty
and not productive members of society. All one had to do is look at Grant Park
in Chicago during the Democratic convention of 1968 and you could see that
anarchy was just around the corner. Nixon was about law and order. His laws.
His order. But the anti-war movement and its slogans began to grow beyond the
beards of the hippies and college professors and it soon began to be chanted in
suburbia by husbands and housewives, tired of losing their children.
Still Nixon held to his beliefs that the US could win in
Vietnam. With enough troops poured at the problems. Enough bombs dropped on the
enemy, he could wear them down. What he didn’t count on was that the American
public was getting worn down with a war that had gone on in one form or the
other for close to a decade. The American electorate was tired of Vietnam. They
were tired of war. Tired of seeing their kids come home in pine boxes.
Four turbulent years passed and America began to listen to
the radicals. It stopped and saw and heard the parents. But Nixon won over
peace candidate McGovern in a huge landslide. The Domino Theory champion had
four more years. (Oh yes, there was that pesky little break-in at the Watergate
Apartments, but it would be swept under the carpet and long forgotten. It was
nothing to be concerned about.)
Democrats on the hill just wouldn’t let go of this silly
little plumber’s unit break-in. They kept asking questions and wanting more and
more information. And then came Woodward and Bernstein and The Washington Post
and the allegations. And there with Senator Baker from Tennessee and Senator
Sam Ervin from North Carolina, sat a senate lawyer in her stylish large round-rim
glasses from Chicago, who kept feeding them questions and data to keep the
harassment going – her name: Hillary Rodham Clinton.
With Nixon trying to fight Vietnam with one hand and hold
the senate at bay with the other, he began to sink. He told Kissinger to make
peace at the Paris talks, but the North Vietnamese could smell victory. They
saw that the American people had no more stomach for the war. So, they stalled.
First they wanted a square table, then it was a round table and then it was ice
in the water and next it was bottled water. The talks could not get off the
ground.
And everyday the talks stalled in Paris, American troops
backed up in Vietnam. Nixon secretly ordered bombing in Cambodia. When it became
public, there was rioting in the streets and across college campuses. Americans
wanted the war over. Get out now, was the battle cry. But Nixon persevered.
Then the break. Deep throat told the guys at the Washington
Post where the bodies were buried (figuratively) and the house of cards came
tumbling down at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Nixon resigned.
The Right was disgraced and yet, the war drug on. Gerald
Ford, Nixon’s replacement, saw the handwriting on the wall and withdrew
American troops as quickly as he could. Then on April 30, 1975 the Vietnam War
came to an abrupt end.
America had lost its first war.
There was celebration in the streets by young people. But
their elders grew pensive and wary. We had never lost a war before. We had
never had a President brought down in disgrace. We were truly at crossroads
where the nation had never traveled before.
Sides were drawn and as they say, the elephant never
forgets.
Chapter Three:
Civil Rights/Voter Rights
Before the calamity of Vietnam drained his administration of
its sanity and vitality, Lyndon Johnson enacted sweeping legislation to make
every person in America a part of the great American Dream. It was called the
1964 Civil Rights Act.
As one Democratic Senator told his colleague at the time of
the vote, ‘Johnson just handed the South to the Republicans for the next 100
years.’ But as dire as that prediction seemed, the turmoil that led to that
momentous day, was even more dividing on America. Race riots. Black versus
whites. Jim Crow laws. Segregation. Separate but equal schools. Sit-ins. Campus
riots. They all were the fodder for the days’ headlines. And with each passing
day, Americans became bitterly divided over the notion that all men should be
free and have equal access to the bounty of the American life.
The signs read “Niggers are commies.” “Darkies go home.” And
the water cannons and attack dogs were unleashed onto the black protesters in
towns now famous for the battles, Selma, Birmingham, Montgomery, Greensboro and
Little Rock. But it was Washington that solved the problem. It was the
Democratic President – Johnson – pushing a Republican Congress to change the
law of the land.
And they did.
Schools in the south were integrated. Bussing started. And a
grumbling from deep within southern culture could be heard and felt across the
land. The Civil Rights Act may be the law of the land, but they didn’t have to
like it.
Then to make matters worse, the Voting Rights Act followed
that gave the negro the same right to vote as his white neighbor. In the North
it had been practiced that way for years, but the old Confederate States were
hard to knock down. (Boston was no walk in the park, either, for that matter.) Poll
taxes and voter ID manipulation and literacy tests were just a few of the
tricks, ultra conservatives placed in the way of blacks to cast a vote. And
with his signature in 1965 of the Voter’s Rights Act, Johnson did what no
President before him had ever attempted. He gave the Blackman a voice in
American Politics.
A real voice.
Politicians in the South hated it. A revolt was growing.
Johnson knew that with this new legislation passed and signed and with Vietnam
stalled and crawling into the quagmire of lost body counts, he would not win
the nomination of the party. So he stepped aside. His Vice President, Hubert
Humphrey, a life-long supporter of human rights, civil rights and the American
Left, lost in a bitter contest to former Vice President Richard Milhous Nixon.
A new day was dawning in America. The Republicans were back
and back with a vengeance after close to a decade of being out of power;
although, with a strange hybrid foundation of southern conservatives and
northern moderates. The party, itself, faced a showdown.
Trouble was, their victory would be short lived. There were
several million new voters out there, who thought of the Republicans as the
devil.
And they still do.
Chapter Four
Watergate and the impeachment of Richard Nixon
I can still see him standing on the top step of Marine One,
the Presidential helicopter, resting on
the damp grass of the White House lawn. His arms raised in a double victory
salute, in that most awkward way he had of moving. Richard Nixon was going
home. Going to California for his final stop. He was no longer welcome in
Washington.
King Richard had been deposed.
A President who had opened China, who had all but brought
the Vietnam conflict to an end, who had tuned the tide in the Cold War with his
(and Henry Kissinger’s) theory of Detente – that same man who gave birth to the
clean water act, the EPA and the fairness in lending act, the President who had
overseen the desegregation of America’s southern schools – he was also the
President that oversaw wage and price freezes to help halt the runaway deficits
and inflations created by the war in Vietnam – this same President ordered a
handful of men in his close company to break in and spy on the Democratic
national headquarters, officed in the Watergate tower.
As any historian will point out, it was a terribly stupid thing
to do. He was going to win re-election by a landslide. It wasn’t even going to
be close. Although never loved as a great man by the public, Nixon was a crafty
politician and had a well-oiled machine running beneath him. Legislative power
and the power to get the vote out had always been his strengths. So to send a
group of bumbling idiots into the competition’s headquarters with the risk of
getting caught was stupid– petty and stupid.
But the bigger mistake is that Nixon lied about it.
Nixon claimed to have no knowledge of the incident. Then there was the investigation by the
Washington Post. Then the Senate got involved. Then it was discovered there
were thirteen minutes of the secretly recorded tapes of Nixon giving the orders
that were suddenly missing from the files.
Nixon was doomed.
Watergate was bringing the King down.
The country became divided. Those who loved Nixon said it
was a coup. Those who disliked him said it was good riddance. The verbal
battles grew in intensity. The meanness of the spirited discourse could not be lost
on the White House, and the cacophony meant that the President could not
concentrate on the job at hand. Ending Vietnam and building his domestic agenda
was being pushed to the back burner with the sounds and fury of the fight over
his pending impeachment.
Nixon confided in his top aids that his “…days were
numbered. The Presidency can not and should not be put through this.” He told
himself he could beat the rap. He was Richard Nixon, after all. He had been
down before. He could rise over this.
But the Senate persisted. The Watergate committee, as it was
called, headed by Erin and Baker, demanded answers. They smelled blood. They
circled. Even Nixon’s most ardent defenders in the Senate told White House
staff they could not stop the wolves at the door.
He had two choices. Go down with the ship in a huge
constitutional fight – or – resign and save the Presidency.
Nixon chose the latter. He had never been a quitter all his
life. But he knew when the fight was over. And in Washington in 1974, there was
no room to wiggle and no support for the long fight.
He resigned.
And in the background playing a very quiet but important
part was a young lawyer identified to conservatives as Hillary Clinton. She
became a marked woman.
As Nixon left Washington, battle lines were already being
drawn. The Right’s mantra was – “Us versus them. Never again will we let them
get to us this way. The media, the democrats and the lawyers, they did us in.
The establishment did us in – but soon we will become the establishment. Soon
the Right will come back and we will rule the day again.”
They just need a cause to give them momentum.
Chapter Five
Roe V Wade
For years and years the way a woman got an abortion was to
go to some dark corner next to a gloomy ally and wait on a shadowy figure to
emerge with a coat hanger and do the deed.
Little to no antiseptic, anesthetic or common sense was
applied to the process. Hundred got
infected and died each year. The theory was, “You got yourself in trouble, this
is your only way out. Suffer, baby.” If you were rich and could afford it,
there were places that would perform abortions and heads were turned and
silence was kept. But for the most part, the murky, dangerous backroom surgery
clinics were the horrible norm.
Then a young woman in Dallas decided enough was enough. The
state had no right to tell her what she could or couldn’t do with her body.
That was a private matter. She took the matter to court and it wound its way
all the way to the United States Supreme Court. That august body of nine men
(in those days) ruled in favor of Roe over the arguments of Dallas District Attorney,
Henry Wade, although by then several solicitors representing the state of
Texas, as well as every religious group in America were at the beck and call of
Wade. Basing their decision on the privacy clause of the Forth Amendment, the
Court declared a state could not stop a woman from having a medical abortion.
It was her right. It was a private matter.
And the war started. The Right had its cause.
At first the feminist movement raised the victor’s
banners. They marched and proclaimed a
new day for women and women’s rights. But Republicans blocked their Equal
Rights Amendment. Pay back. ‘You kill
babies, we don’t give you your rights.’ But the movement pushed on.
Slowly the other side began to organize. After several
failed attempts in getting the Supreme Court to side with them on limiting
abortions, the Right got a slight victory in limiting the trimester approach in
determining if a fetus was viable to live outside the uterus. This was
important, for now the Right had wiggle room to get cases before state legislatures
and courts to begin a new crusade. State-by-state cutting away at the
foundations of Roe v Wade. It was death by a thousand paper cuts.
If abortions were going to be legal, states would and could
make them almost impossible to get due to red tape and fundamental problems in
interpreting the law by and for doctors.
Month-by month, year –by-year, state house pundits pushed
legislation popular among Catholic clergy and extreme right-wing Christian
zealots. No one was going to kill any fetuses on their watch. They were, after
all, Pro-Life.
Planned Parenthood became the targeted body because of their
size and strength. Dozens of clinics across the United Sates were bombed.
Doctors and nurses murdered. But it was all in God’s master plan, because the
anti-abortion group wrapped themselves in the flag and the bible. If you
opposed them you were Un-American and Anti-Christian. There was no room for
discussion.
But the real explosions were quit. Causing at first hardly a
ripple. They came in new laws enacted
state-by-state to deny women access to what was covered legally in national
law. Limits were placed on every step of theprocess.
If there has been one issue that had united the Right base,
it is that Roe v Wade must be overturned. Even to the point that for the last
decade or more, every President who sends a Supreme Court nominee to the Senate
Judiciary Committee for vetting, is grilled and re-grilled on the
constitutionality of abortion as far as Roe v Wade is concerned. Some years the Left wins. Some years the Right wins. But in no years do
they ever agree.
They can’t.
It is an argument that doesn’t have room for compromise, as
it is currently structured. If the left
caves in an inch, Roe v Wade is dead. If
the right says, enough, we will just live with what we have, then the law
stands and they have lost.
It is a fundamental impasse: a game of Mexican Standoff. And
that has the entire legislative process in a molasses. Every spending bill,
every tax bill, every piece of legislation that comes down the pike, the Right
adds an anti-Roe v Wade measure to it. Nothing gets done. The process has to
strip the bills of the Pro-Life amendments and then push on – and the rancor
boils over and Congress returns to its finger pointing and name-calling.
The issue will not go away. The Arabs and Jews will work out
their problems before this is settled.
Chapter Six
Iran Hostage Crisis
“They have taken our embassy and our people.”
That was the word that came out of Tehran on November 4th
when between 300 and 500 students began protesting in front of the U.S. Embassy
in the capital city of Iran. The protest grew into a full scale riots and soon
the embassy guards fell back to a deep defensive posture and files were
shredded to keep the intruders from gathering valuable intelligence about U.S.
activities in the country.
Since the days of the overthrow of the Pro-American Shah and
his family, (
The Shah had been restored to power in a 1953 coup organized by the CIA at the American Embassy against a
democratically-elected nationalist Iranian government, so there had been for a
long time an undercurrent of hostility toward the American Government, but not
her people.) American interest had been strained in the Muslim country.
And with a Revolutionary council run by
Ayatollah Khomeini there was even less
dialog and there was further drifting apart between the two countries.
Most observers thought it was just
rhetoric and posturing until the mob sized control of U.S. soil. Khomeini called the U.S. an infidel and
raised the noise level to the point that the students broke through the gates
and ransacked the embassy. For 444 days from November 4, 1979, to
January 20, 1981, rhetoric became armed resistance and 52 Americans were held
hostage by the Iranian revolutionary government.
President Jimmy Carter, who himself was
in a dogfight for the Presidency, waged a diplomatic war, seeing that the U.S.
and its allies squeezed the Iranian people with embargos and other sanctions.
Those seem not to have the effect Carter wanted. The resolve of the Iranian
people grew. Carter was burned in effigy and the hostages remained locked up.
America was seen as week, especially to
a fringe on the right in the United Sates.
As this was happening Carter’s
popularity in the poles began to slip. The slippage became a nosedive and
suddenly a former governor of California and an old cowboy actor, Ronald Reagan
was in control. The no-nonsense Reagan made overtures during political stops
and stump speeches that if Iran didn’t release the hostages; all hell was going
to break loose in the desert. The joke of the day was, “Do you know how much
glass Reagan could make out of the sands of Iran with a couple of nukes?” While
he never advocated violence and he left the Carter administration alone to
negotiate for the hostage release, the crafty communicator would smile at the
joke and nod and say, “Under my watch we’ll get them back home.”
It is the kind of positive promise the
American people wanted. A do something President who would take charge and
bring dignity back to the USA. There was a remarkable surge of patriotism
behind the campaigning of Reagan. The flag was seen everywhere. The nation stood tall and proud behind what
it perceived to be the stronger of the two men running for the White House.
In early January 1981, a breakthrough happened. Diplomats from
Canada and Germany working along side U.S. State Department officials worked
out a complicated liberation of the hostages. The hostages were
released on the day President Carter's term ended.
And from that day the perception grew
that Democrats were soft on foreign policy.
Regardless, the benefactor in all of
this was President Reagan, who on his first day in office could announce that
the hostages were free and coming home. To this day many people will tell you Reagan
freed the hostages. That is what they remember, because of his pronouncements. Many
on Capitol Hill were amazed that the Reagan White House politicized the event
in their favor, when, after all, the lion’s share of the work had been done by
the unsung heroes of the Carter administration, who knowing they were working
for a lame-duck President still pushed through the torturous task of
negotiating with the Iranians.
One Democratic lawmaker at the time was
heard to exclaim, “If Reagan can take credit for this, he’s libel to think
himself God before the end of his term.” But credit he did take and two things
happened.
Ronald Reagan became the Right’s hero.
Their knight in shinning armor. And to the Left, he had a huge target painted
on his back.
There would be retribution. That’s how
Punitive Politics works.
Chapter Seven
Trickle Down Economics.
To say that America loved Ronald Reagan in the early 1980’s
is like saying dogs like bones. It was a love fest. And the President knew and
used it to his advantage. Even with an embattled Democratic controlled
Congress, he was able to sell many of his programs through the legislative
halls simply on the power he had with the electorate. And Congress knew it and
was scared of it.
But together they had to solve the one problem that had
haunted Jimmy Carter. Stagflation. A
stagnant economy and out of controlled inflation. Many economists theorize it
came about from uncontrolled spending during the Vietnam War era and tax
decreases that left budget offsets in the negative. Nixon, Ford and Carter had
all tried to remedy the growing problem by shifting emphasis from revenue to
spending then back to revenue. Nothing seemed to work. It came to a head in
1979 under the leadership (or lack there of according to Republicans) of Jimmy
Carter. The economy sputtered and went into a freeze. A deep freeze.
On the campaign trail, Reagan promised to fix all this. He
told America he had a plan that would turn the nation, its economy and its tax
code on its ear. Prosperity was just around the corner. And Ronnie, on his
white horse was riding in just in time to save the day.
One of Reagan’s chief planks to his worldview was that true
economic recovery and growth came top down. This flew in the face of long-held
beliefs of Keynesian economists and the legions that followed the
original thought leaders of the New Deal. Regan saw the world as a giant river.
And the more liquid you had at the top, the more that would flow down to those
below. It became known as Trickle Down Economics.
And it didn’t work.
Let me let that last
sentence stick with you for a moment.
It did not work. It
did not work in theory or reality or in any practice the Reagan Administration
wanted to put it into. It was a bust. But Ronald Reagan believed in it so it
must be right. He couldn’t be wrong.
There was an almost
god-like aura around Reagan among Republicans. Ronnie couldn’t be wrong. His theories
must be right Trickle Down just needs more time.
So between his first
and second term, the administration revamped trickle down and tried it again
with a whole new package of economic stimulus including a huge tax break for
the wealthiest Americans and for corporations and a spending increase to get
America’s economy back to work.
It failed again. Failed miserably. At the time it was the
largest economic regression in Americas history short of the Great depression.
(It happened again almost two decade later when George W. Bush tried to revive
the practice of Trickle Down and sent America’s economy into the largest
tailspin in close to sixty-five years. Same theory. Same results. We don’t
learn from our mistakes, too well in America.)
Unfortunately the
fall out of Trickle Down economics didn’t land on Reagan as much as it did his
successor, George H. W. Bush, who had promised, in his campaign, “Read my lips.
No new taxes.”
With the economy
tanking again and the warning signs of debt build up, Wall Street became
alarmed that America might be drifting back into double-digit inflation and
backward growth. The days of Jimmy Carter were predicted all over again. So
Bush had to raise taxes. The increased revenue was needed to pump resources into
the flaccid economy to create a boost. And that cost Bush the Presidency to a
Rhodes Scholar from Hope, Arkansas – Bill Clinton.
Trickle Down was a
bust. A bankrupt notion. A means to lining the pockets of the wealthiest 2% of
Americans, while the rest of the country waited for anything, if at all, to
trickle down. The famous Clinton
campaign line was “Trickled Down Has Petered Out.”
The good will and
fortune the Right had been building and banking was suddenly gone – spent on
the excesses of Trickle Down. There was a new charismatic President in town: a
pragmatic lawyer from Arkansas with a wife the Republicans remembered all too
well. Hillary.
Time to retrench and
get ready for warfare. Trickle Down
would live to see another day.
Chapter Eight
The Monica Lewinsky Scandal
Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan had two similar traits that
served them quite well in their presidencies. Both were excellent
communicators. Perhaps, and even including Kennedy and FDR, the best America
has ever produced. They also had a trait that they didn’t suffer fools.
Reagan didn’t and proved it by carrying on his own
diplomatic agendas and foreign policy missions without the permission or
funding of Congress and without the blessings of the U.S. Senate. It nearly
cost him his presidency.
Clinton did it by placing his wife, Hillary in the forefront
of the public healthcare debate and trying to arrange through her actions a
government heathcare plan similar to Canada’s. The Republicans were waiting in
ambush for her.
The battle had begun. But Hillary was a great fighter, and
Bill was Mr. Teflon. As a team they thwarted the Republicans even after a
mid-term disaster in losing the House of Representatives to a band of radical
Republicans led by Newt Gingrich of Georgia and his “Contract with America.”
The victory allowed the Republicans to smell blood in the
water and it forced Clinton to circle the wagons and go on the road to build
his base in middle America; something he was so adapt at that his rivals
marveled as they, right after winning the house, saw their own numbers begin to
plummet.
It was time to strike while the iron was hot. The Right
attacked Hillary and her socialized medicine plans, and took the whole argument
away from healthcare and placed it squarely on the back of patriotism and the
free enterprise system. (Has a familiar ring to it, doesn’t it?)
While the war of words was raging on healthcare, Bill took a
break from his road warrior days of shoring up the base for the next election.
He eased back and helped himself to a White House aide by the name of Monica Lewinsky.
Just a slight dalliance, except that Republicans were
looking for anyway at all to find a crack in Teflon Bill. There had been
trouble in Arkansas while Clinton was governor of that state that led to an
investigation about bad real estate dealings known as Whitewater Controversy.
That investigation had brought out into the open a young woman by the name of Paula
Jones, who claimed to have had an illicit affair with the governor while he was
in office. Clinton denied it and denied it and denied it some more. The
information from that investigation and then from the knowledge that Lewinsky
had been involved with the President led special prosecutor, Kenneth Starr, to
go after Clinton to get him to trip over his own ego.
Starr won. Clinton
lied under oath. A felony. And a big enough felony that the U.S. Senate began
to debate impeachment proceedings.
The thing that saved Clinton was something that Nixon never
learned. Confess your sins and ask for forgiveness. Clinton did and America
forgave him – but the sinful deed rubbed off on Democrats and political experts
think it cost Al Gore the White House in the next election.
America was ready for wholesome, family values. There were not
any more wholesome a couple in the world than Al and Tipper Gore. Heck, Tipper
had even burned records with suggestive lyrics in the 70’s. One problem,
however, they were Democrats.
Thanks to Monica and Bill, America Got George W. Bush. It
also got Trickle Down Phase III.
The Republicans won the trifecta. They got to Hillary. They
got Bill. And they won the White House back on their own terms. Nothing was
stopping them now. The world was their oyster.
As Karl Rove, Bush’s political advisor boasted, …’we have the
White House now and will for the next generation – perhaps the next 100 years.’
America belonged to the Right. What could possibly go wrong?
Chapter Nine
September 11, 2001
The twin towers collapse into Wall Street. A plane slams
into the Pentagon, and another in a field in Pennsylvania. America was under
attack. We are at war with terrorism.
Surrounding George W. Bush was a team of battle-hardened
veterans, who had stood with his father in the first Gulf War. Chaney at the
Vice President desk, Colin Powell, a national icon as Secretary of State, and
Donald Rumsfeld a life-long government strategist and leader of America’s armed
forces at the Pentagon. If you were going to war, this was the team to have on
your side. Smart. Brave. Tough as nails and didn’t take crap from anyone, and
unlike their counterparts from the Johnson and Nixon days, these guys wanted to win. They wanted a sure
victory. They wanted to have Mission Accomplished plastered across their
records.
But first, who was the enemy?
Even before 911 Dick Chaney had called his energy business
buddies to the White House for a secret meeting. Chaney refused to tell the
members of the news media what the discussions were about. Speculation arose
that Chaney knew about the President’s plan to heap some trouble on the head of
an old family enemy, Saddam Hussein of Iraq. George Bush’s father had been to
war with him some ten years earlier and had not finished the job. The guard on
watch now in W’s administration were not going to let him get away that easily.
It is believed that Chaney was warning his energy friends to batten down the
hatches for a few months, while America paid back an old debt in the Middle
East. Afterwards, all the spoils go to the victor.
Then 911. Then came
the famous Axis of Evil speech before Congress, where Bush started laying out
the plans for going after Hussein, because he was developing weapons of mass
destruction.
Forget that the CIA, FBI and NSA were all telling the White
House that the perpetrators of 911 were from an organization called al-Qaeda,
which was believed to be spearheaded by an American-educated Saudi by the name
of Osma bin Laden. The intelligence community delivered information that the
bulk of the hijackers had been Saudi and Egyptians. There was not one Iraqi on
the panes. Still, Bush wanted war with Iraq.
The 9/11 Commission Report stated that there is "no credible
evidence" that Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq collaborated with the
al-Qaeda terrorist network on any attacks on the United States. In September
2006, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded that "there is
no evidence that Saddam Hussein had prewar ties to al-Qaeda and one of the
terror organization’s most notorious members, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi" and
that there was no evidence of any Iraqi support of al-Qaeda or foreknowledge of
the September 11th attacks.
Still war clouds loomed on the horizon. But
the White House needed a reason. It was called Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Bush said they were there. Colin Powell said they were there. He even told a
session of the General Assembly of the United Nations that Iraq was developing
Weapons of Mass Destruction. Condoleezza Rice, the National security Advisor, told
us they were there. But United Nations inspector Hans Blix, who was on the ground
in Iraq, couldn’t find any evidence what so ever of any WMD.
None.
Now to be sure, Hussien had used chemicals on
the Kurds earlier in a gas attack, but those weapons had been confiscated and
destroyed after the first Gulf War in 1994. With the United States threatening
an all out war if the Iraq’s didn’t turn over their weapons, Blix, said, ”Slow
down, Mr. President. There are none we have found to date.” Bush didn’t care.
He attacked anyway. And for ten years the U.S. has been at war in Iraq and as
of this writing not one Weapon of Mass Destruction has been found, nor was
there ever any evidence discovered that Iraq played a role of any kind in the
911 attacks.
Bush had waged a private war. It would be
great to say financed by the American people; however, trickle down was back in
vogue in Washington, and a huge tax cut had all but made paying for the war in Iraq,
as well as the sister war in Afghanistan, virtually impossible. Debts started
climbing higher and higher and everyone at the White House ignored it. Trickle
Down would pay for it eventually. China was buying our debt so fast that the
joke in the halls of the White House was that the Chinese were financing the
war on terrorism for us.
Then came October 2009. America’s economy tanked. Two months later it
crashed.
Bush scrambled to keep the US out of the
second great depression. He loaned banks billions in the largest bailout in US history,
as well as helped fortify other US businesses.
But the hemorrhage was too much. The patient was on life support.
And Bush was headed back to Texas.
Chapter Ten
Affordable Healthcare Act
There was a new sheriff in town. A man named Barrack Obama.
A freshman Senator from Illinois who ran on the campaign of change.
But instead of change, the first thing President Obama did
was continue the enactment of the Republican sponsored bailout. And the debt
kept climbing. He even enacted the keeping of the Bush Tax cuts in order to win
approval of key legislative ideas he wanted past. He created loan packages for
the automotive industry, the banking industry, as well as home mortgages. The
debt kept rising.
With support strong in the House and in the Senate,
President Obama pushed for and won a legislative milestone. He reformed the
United States healthcare system. And he did it by eschewing the socialized model
of Canada and England and instead, used the free enterprise system that had
been a plan of the Heritage Foundation, a Republican think tank. The same
Heritage Foundation that had gotten a governor in Massachusetts to use the
exact same system there in reforming his state’s healthcare. That governor’s
named – Mitt Romney.
As soon as the Affordable Healthcare Act passed, a
grass-roots movement surge, fueled by right-wing radio and TV talk show hosts
who decried the “Obamacare’ plan was the next step toward socialism and
communism. “Not since the Social Security Act have we moved so close to being a
communistic society,” quipped one right wing radio talking head.
And so the Tea Party movement was begun and has invaded (or
infect, depending upon your political point of view) the Republican Party on
the extreme right side.
No new taxes. Cut spending (except of the military) and get
rid of government in our lives (except for abortion laws that tell a woman what
she can and can’t do.) On that simple platform the Tea Party swept the mid term
elections and has held Congress and the President captive in passing any new
job creation bills or major tax reform. Even dealing with extending the debt
ceiling has proven to be almost impossible to get through a Congress so focused
on one issue.
And while the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has
stated that Obamacare has actually saved the country millions, the Right has
used it as another reason not to trust the “leftist” President who is trying to
force us into a European socialism.
The most ardent, even claim he is destroying the U.S. constitution. (No one
remembers, Nixon or Reagan {Both Republicans} and their trampling all over the
separation of powers clauses in the Constitution.)
So we have come full circle. From the Social Security Act that
was going to make us the next satellite of the Soviet Union to Obamacare, the
final move of America becoming a communist country.
They got rid of
Nixon. We will retaliate. We got rid of Clinton, expect them to retaliate. They
want affordable healthcare, but it will help the black man to get reelected.
But it is the same plan that Republicans pushed six months before Obama won
office. The Democrats want a job bill for the unemployed, but that will get
Obama re-elected. So, Nobody does anything for America.
And so, that is where we are today: Punitive Politics.
Stalemate.
You versus me.
Right versus left.
Neighbor versus neighbor.
Roe versus Wade.
We can’t find common ground.
Is all about getting even. All about getting power. All about keeping
power. Not at all about trying to make America a better place for everyone, but
rather making it better for MY party and a chosen few.
These are the ten major events that have led us to where we
are today.
Here’s what we need to do:
We need to spend less.
We need to raise more revenues.
And raise it across the board, fairly.
We need to revamp the tax code. Close loopholes and make it
as close to flat as possible. And take
it out of the political spectrum of favor-giving.
And we need to quit trying to police the world. Not our job
and it is bankrupting us.
We need to work together and forget about who gets the
credit.
We don’t have the time left to do such petty things.
We need to work out a compromise on Roe v Wade which allows
for people who do not want abortions, not to have to have their money go to
providing them, but in all fifty states, allow the law of the land to stand and
women who choose abortion as a medical route, have the freedom so to do. And then
get over it and leave it alone. For good.
Ten windows, we looked through in our recent history, that
have led us to this point. We can’t go backward and open or close any of them. All
we can do now is move forward. So lets all quit looking backward and demanding
to get even. That is probably the big number eleven if there was one.
We, as a country always want to get even. Those days are
gone. Let them go. Lets move on.
I don’t care who you vote for President. Both guys are
competent. But do this. Do not be fooled by either party with their “ours is
the only way” slogans. IT IS NOT. And get rid of the Tea Party. They will
destroy the America you and I know and love with their tunnel vision and petty
politics. They are NOT good Republicans NOR are they good Democrats. They are
selfish bastards that only want their way or no way.
With the problems facing America, we do not have room at the
table for the noise and inaction of spoiled children. And that is what the are.
These are the ten things that got us where we are today.
Here is the one thing that will get us to tomorrow: Forget them.
Move on. Learn to compromise. It is not a dirty word.
End Punitive Politics.
