"Barry Goldwater said that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.
He said that in 1964. Many people scoffed at him, but now, fifty-plus
years later, I see the wisdom in his advice. Namby-pambies say to
me I must be careful what I wish for lest it come to pass. I say that
if we occasionally ignore the civil liberties of one or two of these
namby-pambies and throw them out with the bathwater, then at
the end of the day we will have saved both the baby and
democracy.”
Samuel Parsons, A Rogue At Ground Zero
“The true believer may see more than coincidence in words that
begin with the letter ‘D’: dialogue, decency, and democracy.
Without dialogue—the uninhibited exchange of thoughts, feelings,
and information--there can be no decency. Without decency—the
respect for the opinions of others, the willingness to listen open-
mindedly to ideas other than our own—there can be no
democracy. Dialogue, decency, and democracy are thus intertwined into
more than a one-letter alphabet soup. Without these three
important words, the other letters of the alphabet and the words
they form—extremism, fascism, and the like—become a true
threat to the American way of life. These threats, as Sinclair
Lewis so ably pointed out in 1935, can happen here.”
Hal Simpson, Editorial in The Carlsbad Current Argus
“What the hell were they thinking?” Hal Simpson thought to himself for at least the third time as he perused the news feeds in his office that morning. The night before, he and a relatively small number of Americans watched as the delegates to the Democratic national convention voted to name Hillary Clinton their 2016 nominee for the office of President of the United States.
Hillary. Hillary. She had become a one name product. While her supporters compared her to other one name leaders such as Moses or Cicero, her detractors (and Hal was among these) listed her with one namers with more style than substance—Cleopatra and Nero, for instance. What is it with the one namers, Hal wondered. Perhaps he was being too anal; maybe it was because people with full names better suited the columns in his newspaper. And yet, it wasn’t George. It was George Washington. Thomas Jefferson. John frickin’ Kennedy. Last names told you the family from which a person sprang. Family meant continuity with those who had come before you and those who would follow you later. Family meant community. Hal doubted that one name legends in their own minds felt the connection with those before them or even those around them. It wasn’t that Hillary hadn’t run a good campaign—it was certainly tighter and had fewer mistakes than her 2012 run when she had resigned as Secretary of State to challenge the incumbent President of her party for the nomination. That was a bloody contest, complete with the usual name calling and challenges to the seating of a few Southern delegates at the convention. Fights over the platform were particularly acrimonious, and as was the habit of the Democratic Party, these were fought in front of klieg lights and television cameras. The pundits said Obama suffered a few deep cuts, but no terminal wounds.
But to Hal, the cuts Hillary inflicted now suggested the weakness and the vanity of a candidate who had failed twice before to get her party’s nomination for President. How could Democrats forget what Hillary had almost cost them four years before? What were they thinking? All the polls showed she badly trailed Samuel Parsons, the presumptive Republican candidate—what were they thinking?
Of course, any Democrat would have problems in 2016. So much had happened to the country, both at home and abroad during the almost-eight year run of the Obama administration.
At home, an administration that inspired such an initial outpouring of support and good will worldwide had sunk ever faster, ever deeper into a course of ineffectiveness and inaction. The national health plan, for which the president had labored so hard in 2009, pleased no one. The poor still felt they were denied an adequate level of health care. Spiraling costs forced the government to slash reimbursement levels, not just angering doctors and hospitals, but forcing many to close their doors. Waiting lines for medical care grew ever larger and it was not long before people who had access to care felt they, too, were being denied what they deserved. Forced to tweak and re-tweak payment policies, the government turned to private business for assistance. After assigning $2.1 trillion in less than five years to Blue Cross, Aetna, Cigna, and a small number of other insurance behemoths, the government found itself hard-pressed to explain why only $1.5 trillion had reached providers. Stories of insurance fat cats, CEOs and CFOs nailing down seven digit bonuses annually (while the typical American household saw its buying power shrink 12% annually) appeared to put yet another nail into the coffin holding Obama's dream for a new America. Sarah Palin, Republican vice-presidential candidate in 2008 and a Fox analyst (Hal could never say “Fox” and “News” in the same sentence), drove home a message of “I told you so” to an American electorate increasingly disenchanted with Washington.
America's economy, crippled by Wall Street fat cats taking advantage of deregulation instituted by earlier administrations, defied all attempts at resuscitation. Massive infusions of government cash failed to create new jobs, failed to create demands for new goods, and failed to create new markets overseas for exports. Recession remained a worldwide problem; when the Wall Street Journal speculated that an implosion of Chinese markets would force that country to collect the huge debt owed it by the United States, stock markets worldwide went into a panic. It was as if an economy hobbling along on one good leg now discovered that last leg would soon be amputated.
And that was the good news.
Internationally, it appeared that the world had gone to hell in a hand bag. After brokering a shaky armistice between Pakistan and India when fighting over Kashmir again broke out, the Obama administration found itself powerless to defuse tensions between India and China along the border of the Indian state of Arunchal Pradesh. It was Vladamir Putin of Russia, diverting his attention from yet another uprising in Chechnya, who brought both sides back from a dispute that seemed to be spiraling toward nuclear confrontation. Many Americans could not understand how an oppressive Russian dictator could win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012.
The Mexican government of Felipe Calderon fell in 2013. Calderon had battled drug cartels for a number of years, committing government troops in ever increasing numbers as the cartels became ever more violent. In Juarez alone, the number of dead had risen from 2657 in 2009 to 5831 in 2012. The social and political vacuum created by the cartel’s targeting of police, lawyers, judges, government members and army troops allowed a flourishing of extortion, kidnappings, and murders by many lesser criminals. Increasingly, Mexican kidnappers and hit men crossed their country’s northern border; while murders of Mexican nationals and naturalized Hispanics in El Paso, Dallas, Atlanta, Denver, Los Angels and Portland caused little notice on Fox News, the murders of an Anglo police officer in Burbank, another in Charlotte, and a judge in Cleveland seemed to put many American communities along the border with Mexico on a war footing. Border crossings at San Diego and El Paso were shut down for months, and without the influx of American dollars, economies in towns like Tijuana and Juarez suffered severely. These towns, and many smaller towns and villages, disintegrated into little more than personal fiefdoms, where criminal militias made and enforced their own laws, where not only local citizens but the regular army was afraid to go.
And on top of all of this, the stakes in the West's confrontation with Islam continued to worsen. In 2011, when Obama's reelection campaign was unofficially begun, American troops remained on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Egyptian government remained weak following its prolonged conflict with Hamas and a half dozen coup attempts in 2010, forcing American troops to occupy the Suez Canal. Saudi Arabia, having committed its resources to bail out Dubai after its 2009 financial meltdown, found its economy in chaos when the continuing global recession lowered international demand for oil to 1960s levels. Unable to pump money into domestic programs, the House of Saud found itself more and more isolated from the populace, which itself was becoming increasingly militant, often expressing itself in violent outbursts against its leaders who were seen as too pro-western.
Around the globe, crowds of rioting Muslims burned straw effigies of Obama. Beheadings of American contractors and service personnel became near daily occurrences. Osama bin Laden and a host of lesser known terrorists continued to threaten a rain of fire on the United States. The president, reacting to one such threat, ordered the Air Force to shoot down a small plane entering Florida airspace. Recovery operations the next day revealed its occupants consisted of two families seeking asylum from Cuba; six children were among the dead. (Hal remembered the editorial he wrote noting the international condemnation of the President’s actions and his short-lived paradoxical rise in his domestic approval rating following the incident.)
The administration’s secret efforts to help foment a violent overthrow of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad went nowhere. The Iranian president’s grip on the country tightened after its violent suppression of riots occurring though 2010. By the time Hossein Mousavi was shot 32 times at point blank range by Iranian secret police the following year, no crowds went to the streets to protest. The shooter, tried for murder, was acquitted when it was discovered his machine gun had only accidentally discharged.
American news outlets were unanimous in vilifying Barack Obama when news of Iran’s successful detonation of its first nuclear weapon became known. Obama, who had long counseled the value of the international community in applying economic sanctions to the Ahmadinejad regime, found himself increasingly isolated. When he lent only limited support to Israel’s carpet bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities, military sites, and capital, he earned no respect either at home or abroad.
By mid-2011, Barack Obama’s smile seemed to remind people more and more of Jimmy Carter. Most man-on-the-street interviews began with high marks for his good intentions; they ended with bewilderment, frustration, or anger with an America where the middle class seemed to be vanishing and a world that seemed to be going to go mad.
Hillary sensed winds were changing and resigned as Secretary of State to free herself to challenge the President in the 2012 Democratic primary. All of Washington marveled at the strength Obama showed in trying to crush his opponent, yet all wondered where was this leadership and resolution in dealing with so many other issues of the day. The pundits all predicted the self-immolation of the Democratic Party.
At the time of the formal kick-off of his reelection campaign, the President seemed to appeal to no one. To many black activists, he was half white. To many white conservatives, he was all black. To conservatives of all colors, he represented tax and spend policies taken to a level they could never have imagined. To liberals, he was bluff and bluster, high on ideas but low on delivery. The industrial North saw an economy in shambles as factories closed; the inability of the government to bail General Motors out of a fourth bankruptcy in 2012 reinforced the perception of the President as an incompetent do-nothing. The rural South with its agricultural economy subject to the increasing vagaries of weather and faced with dwindling government support of its large numbers of poor citizens, saw no hope for any change in the second-term President. The West, where Hispanics and Anglos were growing ever more polarized, showed no interest re-electing a President under whom Phoenix had become first in the world in its number of per capita kidnappings.
Yet, even with the popular dissatisfaction with the sitting President, Clinton found it hard to reclaim the high ground she had tried to hold in the 2008 primaries. The public found her to vacillate on too many issues. She accepted too many large contributions from government contractors. When she and her husband clumsily suggested to a primarily black audience that Obama was not one of them because his mother was a white tramp, a pastor from Birmingham replied that “black coffee with cream is better than white bread covered with green.” Television crews were only too happy to record the name calling that ensued between her husband, the 42nd President of the United States, and the Birmingham pastor, soon to be a guest on an hour-long Oprah Winfrey special on race relations in the United States.
It was the typical Democratic National Convention held in Baltimore in August 2012. The Democrats, long a party of internecine battles and public blood lettings, showed a remarkable consistency in their ability to remain a party of internecine battles and public blood lettings. After all the impassioned speeches and inspired name calling, after the charges of back room deals and challenges of the legitimacy of various state delegations, after the platform fights, floor fights, and fights around the convention hall, neither Obama nor Clinton could claim enough of the 4418 delegates necessary to take the nomination.
After the third ballot, Democratic National Chairman Tim Keane informed the delegates that the doors would be locked and no one would go home until a candidate had been nominated. He allowed more speeches be made as the two candidates used the time to jockey for position, buy votes with promises, and predict victory on the next ballot to any newsperson who would listen.
But it was John Kerry, Clinton’s replacement as Secretary of State, who delivered an impassioned speech on behalf of Obama that finally carried the day. Invoking the spirits of Jefferson, Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy, Kerry had the delegates on their feet crying out “Obama, We Want Ya” for almost twenty minutes.
Media commentators, Hal among them, all agreed on two things. The first was that they never thought they would use the words “impassioned” and “Kerry” in the same sentence. The second was that as the speech was delivered at 3:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, who the hell was awake in television land to hear it?
Barack Obama became the 2012 Democratic candidate for President on the fourth ballot. And now in 2016, Hal mused, like a spurned lover, the Democratic party had forgiven, forgotten, and given all of itself to Hillary. Hillary.
He said that in 1964. Many people scoffed at him, but now, fifty-plus
years later, I see the wisdom in his advice. Namby-pambies say to
me I must be careful what I wish for lest it come to pass. I say that
if we occasionally ignore the civil liberties of one or two of these
namby-pambies and throw them out with the bathwater, then at
the end of the day we will have saved both the baby and
democracy.”
Samuel Parsons, A Rogue At Ground Zero
“The true believer may see more than coincidence in words that
begin with the letter ‘D’: dialogue, decency, and democracy.
Without dialogue—the uninhibited exchange of thoughts, feelings,
and information--there can be no decency. Without decency—the
respect for the opinions of others, the willingness to listen open-
mindedly to ideas other than our own—there can be no
democracy. Dialogue, decency, and democracy are thus intertwined into
more than a one-letter alphabet soup. Without these three
important words, the other letters of the alphabet and the words
they form—extremism, fascism, and the like—become a true
threat to the American way of life. These threats, as Sinclair
Lewis so ably pointed out in 1935, can happen here.”
Hal Simpson, Editorial in The Carlsbad Current Argus
“What the hell were they thinking?” Hal Simpson thought to himself for at least the third time as he perused the news feeds in his office that morning. The night before, he and a relatively small number of Americans watched as the delegates to the Democratic national convention voted to name Hillary Clinton their 2016 nominee for the office of President of the United States.
Hillary. Hillary. She had become a one name product. While her supporters compared her to other one name leaders such as Moses or Cicero, her detractors (and Hal was among these) listed her with one namers with more style than substance—Cleopatra and Nero, for instance. What is it with the one namers, Hal wondered. Perhaps he was being too anal; maybe it was because people with full names better suited the columns in his newspaper. And yet, it wasn’t George. It was George Washington. Thomas Jefferson. John frickin’ Kennedy. Last names told you the family from which a person sprang. Family meant continuity with those who had come before you and those who would follow you later. Family meant community. Hal doubted that one name legends in their own minds felt the connection with those before them or even those around them. It wasn’t that Hillary hadn’t run a good campaign—it was certainly tighter and had fewer mistakes than her 2012 run when she had resigned as Secretary of State to challenge the incumbent President of her party for the nomination. That was a bloody contest, complete with the usual name calling and challenges to the seating of a few Southern delegates at the convention. Fights over the platform were particularly acrimonious, and as was the habit of the Democratic Party, these were fought in front of klieg lights and television cameras. The pundits said Obama suffered a few deep cuts, but no terminal wounds.
But to Hal, the cuts Hillary inflicted now suggested the weakness and the vanity of a candidate who had failed twice before to get her party’s nomination for President. How could Democrats forget what Hillary had almost cost them four years before? What were they thinking? All the polls showed she badly trailed Samuel Parsons, the presumptive Republican candidate—what were they thinking?
Of course, any Democrat would have problems in 2016. So much had happened to the country, both at home and abroad during the almost-eight year run of the Obama administration.
At home, an administration that inspired such an initial outpouring of support and good will worldwide had sunk ever faster, ever deeper into a course of ineffectiveness and inaction. The national health plan, for which the president had labored so hard in 2009, pleased no one. The poor still felt they were denied an adequate level of health care. Spiraling costs forced the government to slash reimbursement levels, not just angering doctors and hospitals, but forcing many to close their doors. Waiting lines for medical care grew ever larger and it was not long before people who had access to care felt they, too, were being denied what they deserved. Forced to tweak and re-tweak payment policies, the government turned to private business for assistance. After assigning $2.1 trillion in less than five years to Blue Cross, Aetna, Cigna, and a small number of other insurance behemoths, the government found itself hard-pressed to explain why only $1.5 trillion had reached providers. Stories of insurance fat cats, CEOs and CFOs nailing down seven digit bonuses annually (while the typical American household saw its buying power shrink 12% annually) appeared to put yet another nail into the coffin holding Obama's dream for a new America. Sarah Palin, Republican vice-presidential candidate in 2008 and a Fox analyst (Hal could never say “Fox” and “News” in the same sentence), drove home a message of “I told you so” to an American electorate increasingly disenchanted with Washington.
America's economy, crippled by Wall Street fat cats taking advantage of deregulation instituted by earlier administrations, defied all attempts at resuscitation. Massive infusions of government cash failed to create new jobs, failed to create demands for new goods, and failed to create new markets overseas for exports. Recession remained a worldwide problem; when the Wall Street Journal speculated that an implosion of Chinese markets would force that country to collect the huge debt owed it by the United States, stock markets worldwide went into a panic. It was as if an economy hobbling along on one good leg now discovered that last leg would soon be amputated.
And that was the good news.
Internationally, it appeared that the world had gone to hell in a hand bag. After brokering a shaky armistice between Pakistan and India when fighting over Kashmir again broke out, the Obama administration found itself powerless to defuse tensions between India and China along the border of the Indian state of Arunchal Pradesh. It was Vladamir Putin of Russia, diverting his attention from yet another uprising in Chechnya, who brought both sides back from a dispute that seemed to be spiraling toward nuclear confrontation. Many Americans could not understand how an oppressive Russian dictator could win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012.
The Mexican government of Felipe Calderon fell in 2013. Calderon had battled drug cartels for a number of years, committing government troops in ever increasing numbers as the cartels became ever more violent. In Juarez alone, the number of dead had risen from 2657 in 2009 to 5831 in 2012. The social and political vacuum created by the cartel’s targeting of police, lawyers, judges, government members and army troops allowed a flourishing of extortion, kidnappings, and murders by many lesser criminals. Increasingly, Mexican kidnappers and hit men crossed their country’s northern border; while murders of Mexican nationals and naturalized Hispanics in El Paso, Dallas, Atlanta, Denver, Los Angels and Portland caused little notice on Fox News, the murders of an Anglo police officer in Burbank, another in Charlotte, and a judge in Cleveland seemed to put many American communities along the border with Mexico on a war footing. Border crossings at San Diego and El Paso were shut down for months, and without the influx of American dollars, economies in towns like Tijuana and Juarez suffered severely. These towns, and many smaller towns and villages, disintegrated into little more than personal fiefdoms, where criminal militias made and enforced their own laws, where not only local citizens but the regular army was afraid to go.
And on top of all of this, the stakes in the West's confrontation with Islam continued to worsen. In 2011, when Obama's reelection campaign was unofficially begun, American troops remained on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Egyptian government remained weak following its prolonged conflict with Hamas and a half dozen coup attempts in 2010, forcing American troops to occupy the Suez Canal. Saudi Arabia, having committed its resources to bail out Dubai after its 2009 financial meltdown, found its economy in chaos when the continuing global recession lowered international demand for oil to 1960s levels. Unable to pump money into domestic programs, the House of Saud found itself more and more isolated from the populace, which itself was becoming increasingly militant, often expressing itself in violent outbursts against its leaders who were seen as too pro-western.
Around the globe, crowds of rioting Muslims burned straw effigies of Obama. Beheadings of American contractors and service personnel became near daily occurrences. Osama bin Laden and a host of lesser known terrorists continued to threaten a rain of fire on the United States. The president, reacting to one such threat, ordered the Air Force to shoot down a small plane entering Florida airspace. Recovery operations the next day revealed its occupants consisted of two families seeking asylum from Cuba; six children were among the dead. (Hal remembered the editorial he wrote noting the international condemnation of the President’s actions and his short-lived paradoxical rise in his domestic approval rating following the incident.)
The administration’s secret efforts to help foment a violent overthrow of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad went nowhere. The Iranian president’s grip on the country tightened after its violent suppression of riots occurring though 2010. By the time Hossein Mousavi was shot 32 times at point blank range by Iranian secret police the following year, no crowds went to the streets to protest. The shooter, tried for murder, was acquitted when it was discovered his machine gun had only accidentally discharged.
American news outlets were unanimous in vilifying Barack Obama when news of Iran’s successful detonation of its first nuclear weapon became known. Obama, who had long counseled the value of the international community in applying economic sanctions to the Ahmadinejad regime, found himself increasingly isolated. When he lent only limited support to Israel’s carpet bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities, military sites, and capital, he earned no respect either at home or abroad.
By mid-2011, Barack Obama’s smile seemed to remind people more and more of Jimmy Carter. Most man-on-the-street interviews began with high marks for his good intentions; they ended with bewilderment, frustration, or anger with an America where the middle class seemed to be vanishing and a world that seemed to be going to go mad.
Hillary sensed winds were changing and resigned as Secretary of State to free herself to challenge the President in the 2012 Democratic primary. All of Washington marveled at the strength Obama showed in trying to crush his opponent, yet all wondered where was this leadership and resolution in dealing with so many other issues of the day. The pundits all predicted the self-immolation of the Democratic Party.
At the time of the formal kick-off of his reelection campaign, the President seemed to appeal to no one. To many black activists, he was half white. To many white conservatives, he was all black. To conservatives of all colors, he represented tax and spend policies taken to a level they could never have imagined. To liberals, he was bluff and bluster, high on ideas but low on delivery. The industrial North saw an economy in shambles as factories closed; the inability of the government to bail General Motors out of a fourth bankruptcy in 2012 reinforced the perception of the President as an incompetent do-nothing. The rural South with its agricultural economy subject to the increasing vagaries of weather and faced with dwindling government support of its large numbers of poor citizens, saw no hope for any change in the second-term President. The West, where Hispanics and Anglos were growing ever more polarized, showed no interest re-electing a President under whom Phoenix had become first in the world in its number of per capita kidnappings.
Yet, even with the popular dissatisfaction with the sitting President, Clinton found it hard to reclaim the high ground she had tried to hold in the 2008 primaries. The public found her to vacillate on too many issues. She accepted too many large contributions from government contractors. When she and her husband clumsily suggested to a primarily black audience that Obama was not one of them because his mother was a white tramp, a pastor from Birmingham replied that “black coffee with cream is better than white bread covered with green.” Television crews were only too happy to record the name calling that ensued between her husband, the 42nd President of the United States, and the Birmingham pastor, soon to be a guest on an hour-long Oprah Winfrey special on race relations in the United States.
It was the typical Democratic National Convention held in Baltimore in August 2012. The Democrats, long a party of internecine battles and public blood lettings, showed a remarkable consistency in their ability to remain a party of internecine battles and public blood lettings. After all the impassioned speeches and inspired name calling, after the charges of back room deals and challenges of the legitimacy of various state delegations, after the platform fights, floor fights, and fights around the convention hall, neither Obama nor Clinton could claim enough of the 4418 delegates necessary to take the nomination.
After the third ballot, Democratic National Chairman Tim Keane informed the delegates that the doors would be locked and no one would go home until a candidate had been nominated. He allowed more speeches be made as the two candidates used the time to jockey for position, buy votes with promises, and predict victory on the next ballot to any newsperson who would listen.
But it was John Kerry, Clinton’s replacement as Secretary of State, who delivered an impassioned speech on behalf of Obama that finally carried the day. Invoking the spirits of Jefferson, Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy, Kerry had the delegates on their feet crying out “Obama, We Want Ya” for almost twenty minutes.
Media commentators, Hal among them, all agreed on two things. The first was that they never thought they would use the words “impassioned” and “Kerry” in the same sentence. The second was that as the speech was delivered at 3:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, who the hell was awake in television land to hear it?
Barack Obama became the 2012 Democratic candidate for President on the fourth ballot. And now in 2016, Hal mused, like a spurned lover, the Democratic party had forgiven, forgotten, and given all of itself to Hillary. Hillary.
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