Back to Basics

Hollywood films eject a powerful impact that influences the world.  As incredible as it may seem, sometimes that influence is for the good.

To prove that point, the Academy Award winning film, Lincoln, prompted interest in American History which in turn provided a boom for book sellers. The movie, a box office smash, created an intense desire within theater patrons to learn everything possible about the early president by devouring books with “Lincoln” in the title.

The most thorough insight of the 16th president graces the pages of “Lincoln” by David Herbert Donald (Touchstone Books-Simon & Shuster1995), and now newly re-discovered.

This is THE definitive book of Abraham Lincoln and the most thorough examination of the man behind the presidency who so shaped the United States ever to be published. .

Author David Herbert Donald stated in his forward that he wanted a more “grainy” biography of Mr. Lincoln than had been published in the past. In this, he succeeded admirably.

Eschewing the obligatory gloss and romanticism found in most books written about him, we see at last, the honest, human side of Mr. Lincoln, warts and all, that not only gives us a better understanding of one of the most important men in American history, but challenges us all to let nothing hold us back from following the paths of our own hearts.

Mr. Donald’s book is rich with little known information about Abraham Lincoln’s childhood, his dysfunctional family, his surprising sense of humor, pranks, and his regular bouts with melancholy and depression so severe that, “he took to his bed for over a week.”

Donald’s book gives attention to Lincoln’s unquenchable ambition, to his brain-numbing labor in his law practice, to his tempestuous married life, and his repeated defeats. And herein lies the success of this book; its honesty in portraying Lincoln as a human being with whom we can all identify.

There are many poignant scenes that come vividly alive in these pages, some so personal that a times the reader may feel he is intruding. One such scene shows Mr. Lincoln alone, and lonely in the Soldiers’ Home 3 miles from the capitol. His wife Mary was recovering from a carriage accident which resulted in a head injury. Lincoln could not spend much time at her bedside because of the draft riots in New York. Union troops had to be called to New York to try and restore order.

During this period, Lincoln reflected on his administration, his challenges and accomplishments. His problems were many including the still unsolved slavery issue. He was stubborn to the point of believing that only he could solve the problems at hand, which made him seem abrupt, even rude by some. Others accused him of being a dictator.

It became a private time of introspection and mental justification of many of his misunderstood actions. As he stares into space we want to slip quietly away, without disturbing him, closing the door gently behind us.

The myths are dispelled. He did not scribble the Gettysburg Address on the back of an envelope on the train taking him to the site. Lincoln worked many hours to craft that speech, re-writing it 50 times, checking every dot and comma.

He had more than his share of detractors. He was not unanimously loved as we might believe.

Was Bill Clinton not alive when Bill Clinton was President? It’s like he forgets that he’s the butt of his own jokes.

Anyway, apparently a good time was had by all yesterday as all the surviving U.S. presidents gathered at the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library.

During the speeches, George W. Bush expressed his love of country; Jimmy Carter expressed his love for Bush’s Africa policies; Barack Obama expressed his love of “immigration reform”; and, as usual, Bill Clinton expressed his love for Bill Clinton. A speech by the latter culminated in an uncomfortable joke about Bush-the-Painter doing a bathroom portrait of former President Downtrousers:

Bush hasn’t yet painted Clinton? Then who did this one?

Bubba’s entire speech is here. “Mother of All Cackles” alert at about the 2:36 mark.

As President Obama prepares his State of the Union Address and the nation looks forward to a Presidents Day holiday, Americans should consider the warning examples of our worst chief executives.

While few of Washington and Lincoln’s successors could hope to replicate their epic achievements, every president can — and must — focus on avoiding the appalling ineptitude of John Tyler, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan and their feckless fellow travelers on the road to presidential perdition. The common elements that link our least successful leaders teach historical lessons at least as important as the shared traits of the Rushmore Four: Broken promises and gloomy temperaments lead inevitably to an alienated public.

All the chief executives unmistakably identified as failures displayed a self-destructive tendency to violate the core promises of their campaigns. Take Tyler, the unbending Virginia aristocrat who won election to the vice presidency in 1840 and assumed the highest office when his predecessor died just a month after inauguration. The new chief executive, dubbed “His Accidency” by critics, used 10 unpopular vetoes to block implementation of his own party’s longstanding ledges. Most of his Cabinet resigned in protest, and eventually they all quit while the hostile Senate voted down four new Cabinet appointments — a record that stands to this day.

Between 1853 and 1861, Pierce and Buchanan completed back-to-back disastrous terms in which personal weakness and pro-Southern sympathies shattered confident promises of unifying leadership. Buchanan pledged to stop “agitation of the slavery question” and to “destroy sectional parties.” By the end of his term, seven Southern states seceded from the union and the nation lunged toward the Civil War.

After that war and Lincoln’s assassination, Andrew Johnson (Lincoln’s vice president) defied members of the martyred president’s Cabinet and congressional leaders, ignoring commitments to lead former slaves to dignity and full civil rights.

In the 20th century, Herbert Hoover’s slogan promised “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage,” but he presided over the beginning of the Great Depression. Similarly, Jimmy Carter’s 1976 platform pledged to reduce unemployment to 3%, but Carter ran for re-election with more than twice that rate.

No wonder that Hoover and Carter, like other unsuccessful presidents, came across as gloomy, self-righteous sufferers. Hoover’s secretary of State said that a meeting with him was “like sitting in a bath of ink.” Carter staked his presidency on a notoriously sour televised address that became known as “The Malaise Speech,” warning the appalled public of a “crisis of the American spirit.”

None of our least successful presidents displayed the self-deprecatory humor of Lincoln or the sunny dispositions that powered the Roosevelts (Theodore and Franklin) and Ronald Reagan. A visitor described the Pierce White House as a “cold and cheerless place,” noting the isolation of the invalid first lady, in deep mourning for three dead sons.

When Buchanan welcomed successor Lincoln, he plaintively declared: “My dear, sir, if you are as happy on entering the White House as I on leaving, you are a very happy man indeed.”

The result of the depressing and erratic leadership of our six most conspicuous presidential failures is that all managed to estrange a once-admiring electorate within the space of a single term.

A comparison between Ronald Reagan’s and Barack Obama’s first inauguration speeches reveals the gap between their understanding of the role of government and how much America has declined from January 1981 and January 2009.

In 1981 Reagan told Americans that “These United States are confronted with an economic affliction of great proportions.  We suffer from one of the longest and one of the worst sustained inflations in our national history. It distorts our economic decisions, penalizes thrift, and crushes the struggling young and the fixed-income elderly alike. It threatens to shatter the lives of millions of our people.”

In 2009, the nation was reeling from the financial crisis brought on by two government entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who had not merely purchased mortgages of dubious value, but had pressured banks to make such loans. It was a crisis made by the government, based on liberal programs intended to ensure that even people who could not afford a home, could have one.

In 1981, there was another burden as well. Reagan told Americans that as “great as our tax burden is, it has not kept pace with public spending. For decades, we have piled deficit upon deficit, mortgaging our future and our children’s future for the temporary convenience of the present.” He warned that “to continue this long trend is to guarantee tremendous social, cultural, political, and economic upheavals.” Those upheavals arrived in 2008, requiring the government to bail out banks and other financial institutions with billions of public funds.

In 2009, Americans could not have even imagined that the Obama administration would increase the national debt by six trillion dollars or that it would grow to $16 trillion within a scant four year’s time.

Obama told Americans that the economy “is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some”, by which he meant the victims of government programs and policies—the nation’s banking system—but he also blamed “our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.” We now know that his “new age” was a shift to a socialist approach in which government would select winners and losers in the previous free market, the failure to reform “entitlement” programs going broke,  and the vast expansion of government programs that would put nearly half the population on the public dole.

Reagan had warned against this in 1981. “You and I, as individuals, can, by borrowing beyond our means, but for only a limited period of time. Why, then, should we think that collectively, as a nation, we are not bound by that same limitation?” Obama would be the first President to see the nation’s credit rating, the best in the world, reduced.

Reagan said, “We are a nation that has a government—not the other way around. And this makes us special among the nations of the Earth. Our government has no power except that granted to it by the people.

Democrats do not have a great track record in the White House. The number of Democratic presidents who have won second terms is small and becomes much smaller with the second half of the 20^thCentury.  Unlike Congressional shifts which reflect regional politics more than a national referendum, the Presidency is a referendum on the usages of the nearly unlimited power of its holder.

The Democratic strategy has been to substitute iconography for competence and their iconic presidents have invariably been men of dubious character. FDR rode to power on the coattails of the Roosevelt name, after conducting a smear campaign against Teddy Roosevelt’s son who would have been the natural candidate.

Once in power, FDR assembled a grab-bag of bad ideas from European Socialists and Fascists and employed a small army of writers and artists as propagandists to lionize his programs. Marginally competent, Roosevelt the Second cultivated an aristocratic paternal air, surrounded himself with experts and programs to create public confidence.

FDR did not fix the economy, but he did lead the country through World War II while preemptively losing World War III, which was enough to give him the iconic status that had made his presidency possible.

The Roosevelt Administration, with an assist from Harry Truman, had largely created the Soviet Empire through its betrayal of Eastern Europe and the Republic of China. The Liberal camp had been thoroughly infiltrated by Communist agents and was full of sympathizers for the Soviet Union.

Truman’s disastrous China policy led to the Communist takeover of a potential world power and to the bloody Korean War. The aftermath of the FDR Administration was largely preoccupied with covering up the disastrous results of its Communist-friendly program. The campaigns against McArthur and McCarthy were necessary to cover up the consequences of Truman’s China policy and FDR’s USSR policy.

The Democrats lost the White House and the public turned to Eisenhower to clean up the strategic mess left behind by the progressive party. The great national crisis was Communism and the Democrats had not seen the crisis coming and had no credibility in deploying a policy to combat the Soviet Union.

To retake the White House the Democrats needed a new image and a candidate with credibility fighting Communism. That candidate was to be a Kennedy, a member of a family at odds with FDR due to its Nazi sympathies, whose patriarch had taken careful care to burnish the Anti-Communist credentials of his sons.

FDR had been the avuncular figure in the chair; JFK was to be the youth candidate. The new man, a creature of the old Joe Kennedy, with fresh new ideas written for him by ghostwriters. Like FDR, JFK was a manufactured figure. And like him, JFK was a man of ideas with no ideas who disguised that lack with an army of experts and the cultivated illusion of intellectualism.

JFK was not particularly Anti-Communist, but that was a necessary qualification for any candidate looking to carry on FDR’s work.

The American presidency came to an end on October 15, 1992 during a Town Hall debate between Bush I, Ross Perot and Bill Clinton. The stage of the Town Hall seemed more like a place for Phil Donahue or Sally Jesse Raphael to strut around, biting their lips, and dragging out tawdry tales for audience applause, than for three presidential candidates to discuss the future of the country.

The audience had more in common with the one that usually showed up to cheer or boo Sally or Phil’s guests, and the high point of the evening and the end of the country came when one of those guests rose and with the distinctive painstakingly slurred pronunciation of the semi-literate demanded that the candidates tell her how the “National Debt” had affected them personally.

Bush I stumblingly tried to turn her stupidity into some kind of policy question, but the WW2 vet was completely out of his depth on Phil Donahue’s talk show stage. The moderatrix however demanded that he answer how it had affected him personally. Forget the country or the consequences, feelings mattered more than policy. It was a Phil Donahue moment and the Donahue candidate stepped into the spotlight.

Bill Clinton understood that the Sally Jesse Raphael audience member did not have a clue what the National Debt is or anything about the economy. But he also knew that it didn’t matter. This wasn’t about the facts, this was an “I Feel” moment. The questioner did not want to know how a problem would be solved, she only wanted to know that the people on top “cared” about her, and Clinton did what he did best– he told her that he really cared.

The draft dodging hippie who had boasted of his drug use and gone to Moscow to defame his country, a man who was at the time every bit the extreme impossible candidate that Obama would become 16 years later, went on to the White House. And the American presidency ended.

Bush II made sure that he would never repeat his father’s mistake. He ran as the “Compassionate Conservative” and the “Uniter, Not the Divider”. He ran as the man who could never be caught flat-footed by an “I Feel” question. Bush II always felt things and insisted on sharing them with us.

The American presidency existed the age of policy and entered the age of empathy. Competency no longer mattered. The man in the grey suit who understood the issues had no place on the stage. To get there he would have to get in touch with his inner child and talk about it. He would have to spill his feelings out so that people really believed that he cared.

Without October 15, 1992, there would have been no Clinton. And without Clinton there would have been no Obama. The Democrats had nominated bad men before, but they came with the patina of experience and credibility. Even the sleaziest and least inexperienced Democratic President, JFK, spent decades polishing his resume and countering his weak points in a calculated plan to get to the top.

As the nation’s news media and political commentators prepare to cover the upcoming Democratic National Convention beginning on Tuesday in Charlotte, North Carolina, there’s enormous excitement over the scheduled appearance of former President Bill Clinton, known to his detractors as “Slick Willie.” The convention scheduled to begin right after Labor Day will undoubtedly cause the political left to swoon over the two Democrats hailed as great orators — Clinton and President Barack Obama.

“To many Democrats and newsroom denizens, Obama remains a man of mystery with fact and fiction so mixed together that few understand his motivations, but Bill Clinton is an open book,”said former political consultant Steven Bonerz. “And these news people — especially the males — giggle like schoolgirls when the name of Clinton enters the conversation.”

“The hero worship that follows Bill Clinton is mysterious since so much is known about him. Actually, too much is known about him,” he said.

Bonerz points to the Monica Lewinsky scandal as being merely a diversion from the serious character flaws that some psychologists claim is symptomatic of a sociopath. Clinton was accused of raping a woman, yet the feminists love him. He’s been accused of being a powerful man who sexually harassed powerless women. And yet the liberal-left, moderates and even some conservatives figuratively worship the ground on which he walks.

Add to that list obstruction of justice, perjury and witness intimidation, and one has the picture of a criminal cad rather than a great statesman, adds Anita McDonald, a former police officer who specialized in crimes against female victims.

“A woman [Kathleen Willey] with a husband who was out of work and suffering from illness goes to see then President Clinton in 1993, and he gropes her? He attempts to have sex with her in the Oval Office? The same Oval Office from which he sent servicemen to their deaths in Somalia,” notes McDonald.

“He is the first President since Andrew Johnson to be impeached and he was disbarred; he headed a White House that laid the foundation for the corruption that exists today in the Obama White House,” claims Bonerz.

But political opponents are not the only ones who are willing to point out the alleged corruption in Clinton’s character.

Even his own FBI director, Louis Freeh, says the former president let down the American people and the families of American victims of the Khobar Towers terror attack in Saudi Arabia during the Clinton administration.

After promising to bring to justice those responsible for the bombing at Khobar Towers – a bombing that killed 19 and injured hundreds — Freeh says Clinton refused to personally ask Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah to allow the FBI to question bombing suspects the kingdom had in their custody.

Freeh writes in his book, My FBI: “Bill Clinton raised the subject only to tell the crown prince that he understood the Saudis’ reluctance to cooperate and then he hit Abdullah up for a contribution to the Clinton Presidential Library.”

Said Freeh, “That’s a fact that I am reporting.”

Freeh says he was determined to stay on as FBI director until President Clinton left office so that Clinton could not appoint his successor.

Bill Clinton was many things, but stupid was never one of them. Even his supporters were eventually forced to admit that most of those things were true. Sloppy, corrupt, impulsive, amoral, vindictive, petty and loving every minute of it. Sure. But not stupid.

Clinton was of the left, but he was a politician first. He understood politics as more than just gamesmanship, a set of rules, procedures and technicalities, powerful people to court, an image to cultivate and opponents to destroy.

What Clinton understood, and Obama doesn’t, is that politics is about people. And that politics is nothing without people. 400 glowing articles don’t compare to what people are feeling when they’re unemployed, when they’re not sure how they’ll make payroll next month and when they sit toting up the numbers late at night and worrying about the future.

Obama isn’t so much a machine politician as he is a politician of the machine. A man whose career was made by one machine after another. Smooth gleaming urban monstrosities guiding him from one organization to another, from handshakes to dinners to ballots to signatures. Politics to him is nothing but a power game almost completely detached from the people. They’re spectators, showing up to faint, cheer and buy him drinks afterward.

Politics to Obama is its own game, like law or basketball. The people in the stands and benches make it necessary, but they don’t really figure into it except as a nebulous crowd providing moral support. What really matters are how you win the game, the rules and the way you can break the rules. It’s all that matters.

Considering his level of emotional detachment, Obama has been good at faking it. But most of the fakery is second-hand. The work of an army of advisers and a grass-roots movement determined to create a Hollywood idea of the hero, who wins elections, defeats conservatives, and like at the end of every political movie, connects with the voters by delivering a speech that sets out the stakes.

Bill Clinton knows that’s a load of crap. He’s played that game, he’s had those advisers, and he’s given those speeches, but he has enough of a background in real world elections to know that nobody really gives a damn about the speeches. They’ll listen to them when they’re first getting to know you or when something important happens, but mostly people elect politicians to do things for them.

Clinton, like McCain, underestimated the power of the machine behind Obama. The new world order of digital power, manufactured cult-of-personality media complex and sheer arrogant rule-breaking. Slick Willy had tasted two out of that three in his time, but no one ever worshiped him as a god. And certainly no one was going to faint on listening to his wife or build statues to her. Hillary would not inspire works of art or paeans of praise.

But Bill also had the last laugh. Because gods are not allowed to let you down. Gods are not allowed to keep blaming Bush or the Republicans. They’re not allowed to promise to take care of things later. That’s not what people elect gods for.

Can you imagine, 151 years ago today, the nation’s greatest president was sworn into office?

And you can read Lincoln’s words, “First Inaugural Address, Monday, March 4, 1861“:

One section of our country believes slavery is right and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong and ought not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute. The fugitive-slave clause of the Constitution and the law for the suppression of the foreign slave trade are each as well enforced, perhaps, as any law can ever be in a community where the moral sense of the people imperfectly supports the law itself. The great body of the people abide by the dry legal obligation in both cases, and a few break over in each. This, I think, can not be perfectly cured, and it would be worse in both cases after the separation of the sections than before. The foreign slave trade, now imperfectly suppressed, would be ultimately revived without restriction in one section, while fugitive slaves, now only partially surrendered, would not be surrendered at all by the other.

Physically speaking, we can not separate. We can not remove our respective sections from each other nor build an impassable wall between them. A husband and wife may be divorced and go out of the presence and beyond the reach of each other, but the different parts of our country can not do this. They can not but remain face to face, and intercourse, either amicable or hostile, must continue between them. Is it possible, then, to make that intercourse more advantageous or more satisfactory after separation than before? Can aliens make treaties easier than friends can make laws? Can treaties be more faithfully enforced between aliens than laws can among friends? Suppose you go to war, you can not fight always; and when, after much loss on both sides and no gain on either, you cease fighting, the identical old questions, as to terms of intercourse, are again upon you.

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it. I can not be ignorant of the fact that many worthy and patriotic citizens are desirous of having the National Constitution amended. While I make no recommendation of amendments, I fully recognize the rightful authority of the people over the whole subject, to be exercised in either of the modes prescribed in the instrument itself; and I should, under existing circumstances, favor rather than oppose a fair opportunity being afforded the people to act upon it. I will venture to add that to me the convention mode seems preferable, in that it allows amendments to originate with the people themselves, instead of only permitting them to take or reject propositions originated by others, not especially chosen for the purpose, and which might not be precisely such as they would wish to either accept or refuse. I understand a proposed amendment to the Constitution—which amendment, however, I have not seen—has passed Congress, to the effect that the Federal Government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States, including that of persons held to service.

PBS recently aired a two-part television documentary on Bill Clinton, his life, and his two terms in office from 1993 to 2001.

Following the years of economic growth and optimism from the Reagan-Bush41 era, it may have just been inevitable that the voters wanted to put a younger man in the White House. At the time, few of us realized how seriously demented, Al Gore, Clinton’s choice for his vice president, would turn out to be.

Mostly, though, I think of how deeply flawed Clinton was and how the presidency seemed to exaggerate and exacerbate those flaws of character and judgment. The worst part of it was that, even before he was elected, the voters knew he was a womanizer. The Gennifer Flowers affair erupted during the first campaign and, with Hillary by his side, he just brushed it aside and so did the voters.

A man who will cheat on his wife, will cheat on his partners in business, and just about everyone else. Bill Clinton demonstrated that and yet the voters either ignored or forgave him the long trail of women he exploited with or without their consent including a sordid relationship with a very young White House intern.

What the PBS documentary demonstrated was that Clinton was bitten by the presidential bug early in life, possibly when he met John F. Kennedy as part of a group of boys tagged as having potential for public service. That brief moment seemed to say that he knew he was going to be President one day, no matter what it took.

Clinton was blessed with a high level of intelligence. There is, however, often a disconnection between intellectual skills and moral judgment. We see this repeated and reported day after day when men who have achieved status and wealth just throw it away. In the private sector it is a private tragedy affecting its victims, but in the public sector, it puts everyone’s welfare and future at risk.

Clinton, like Barack Obama, arrived in the White House without any experience in the military. Not only that, he didn’t like or trust the men who protect our liberties and take an oath to protect the Constitution and to obey the Commander-in-Chief. Clinton almost immediately tried to eliminate the ban on homosexuals in the military, having to finally settle for “Don’t Ask. Don’t Tell.” Obama eliminated even that.

Clinton was fortunate enough to have had no big or small wars on his watch, but there was massive slaughter in Rwanda he later regretted he did nothing to deter or stop, but neither did the United Nations.

What I recall of the 1990s was that it was so different from the previous Reagan years. Ronald Reagan believed Americans could achieve anything if the government would just get out of the way.

Clinton was an old style, liberal Democrat who thought government exists to get involved in everyone’s life in every way possible. Americans used to hate that, but from the 1930s through the 1960s, first Social Security and later Medicare got them used to being on the government dole. Comparable programs exist in every department of the government.

In the 1980s, there were many missed cues as to what was coming on 9/11.