Culture Vulture

Hard as it may seem, the Presidential election is now only 10 months away. It seems like it's been going on forever all ready. Truly, we are in the era of the "endless campaign," when the jockeying for political advantage for the next run for the Presidency starts 15
minutes after the current President is sworn in. Whoever was responsible for that ought to be exiled to a land far away that doesn't have high speed Internet service or hand-held Blackberry communication devices. That sort of sounds a bit like Vermont right now.
At any rate, we have a passel of candidates in both parties who have been crisscrossing the country with a certain focus on the early primary or caucus states like Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, engaging in so-called debates, town hall meetings and the obligatory coffee and doughnuts chat with prospective voters. Only in recent
weeks have any of the candidates begun to focus in to any degree of specificity that would enable voters to get a sense of what they would actually do with regard to foreign and domestic issues if elected President. But at least now it's getting a little more
interesting, particularly on the Democrat side, where  Senator Barrack Obama seems to have finally overcome an earlier reluctance to take on Senator Hillary Clinton, the acknowledged front-runner in that party's primary. Over on the GOP side, the regrettable tendency of primaries to attract only the most hard-core of a political party's supporters seems to have encouraged their front-runners to engage in a game of who can best claim the mantle of Ronald Reagan and who is safest on social issues close to the heart of right-wing Republicans.
General elections, however on won on the basis of who appeals most to the majority of voters on the political center. Voters will want to carefully follow the delicate dance that Presidential candidates have to do to court primary voters successfully, who then find themselves obliged to pivot back to the political center to scoop up the middle-of-the-road voters to succeed in the general election.
The issues the candidates run on matter. A candidate who says they are for cutting taxes, for example, doesn't have a mandate to do the opposite should circumstances dictate. Such a reversal underlay the demise of the first George Bush, when "Read my lips, no new taxes," turned out not to be a workable policy. There's a fine line between
political expediency and pragmatism.
Here are a few of the major issues we see as critical. We'll look at only two here today - foreign policy and energy policy. The two are, of course, very interrelated.
Every election lately seems to be characterized as a "turning point" or a "crossroads" in the nation's history, and to some degree that is true. But the winner of the 2008 election would seem to be likely to inherit a table groaning with leftover issues and unfinished
business. The War in Iraq, obviously, commands center stage. Whether in the long run the Bush Administration's grand strategy of defusing the radical Islamic terrorist threat by toppling Saddam Hussein and installing a democratic government in the heart of the Middle East turns out to be successful, remains to be seen. At best, this will be a ?success? bought at a much higher price than any of the war?s architects imagined. Clearly the means they chose to achieve that risky outcome were deeply flawed. The conflict has gone on far longer, and at vastly greater cost, both in blood and
financial treasure, than its proponents thought. And they should have
thought longer about it because the aftermath of the initial phase was obvious ? an Iraqi insurgency.
So foreign affairs, certainly when it comes to Iraq, but hardly limited to that, will be a major testing area for the new administration, whoever it turns out to be. Included in that realm would be relations with rising powers like India and china, and how to cope with a resurgent Russia, its wounded self-image now fortified by oil revenues. How do we get back on track with our historic European allies, a process the chastened Bush administration now seems to be taking more seriously. And that is only what's at the top
of that list.
But just because the present administration downplayed "nation building" in preference to military intervention, that doesn't mean the latter is a tool that should be thrown out of the tool shed. So candidates for President should be asked - under what circumstances
would you authorize military force in foreign lands?
Foreign policy of course, spills over into a lot of areas. The second big issue the new administration will have to deal with more seriously and coherently is energy policy. Moving forcefully in the direction of energy independence, away from reliance on the Middle Eastern petro-states, is a top priority. Encouraging all kinds of alternatives, from renewables such as wind and solar is one thing, but achieving meaningful energy independence goes far beyond that.
Specific measures like a tax on carbon dioxide emissions, a guaranteed floor price for oil so alternative energy suppliers don't have to fear being run out of business if the price of oil collapses again (hard as that may be to fathom in an era of $90-100 per barrel
oil, it could happen), a cap-and-trade system of controlling carbon emissions, maybe even a gas tax and certainly mandated much higher fuel economy standard in automobiles - these are but a few of the ideas that come readily to mind.
They all share a common denominator - they involve pain and sacrifice. Anyone running for President should then be asked ? when will you directly tell the voting public not what it wants to hear, but what it needs to hear on energy? What will your prescription be, and do you have the courage to ask all Americans to play their
necessary roles.
While we're taking care of business on the energy independence front, we'll also be moving in the right direction on climate change and global warming issues. There's no shortage of compelling circumstantial evidence we're going through a warming phase. The issue what can we do to meaningfully modify that.  There's no simple solution, and those that are out there carry expensive price tags that need to be factored into the discussion.
Next up: the domestic issues.

Posted by Andrew McKeever at 12:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

For a history wonk, it almost doesn’t get any better than the talk given last night (Wednesday, Dec. 5) at the First Congregational Church in Manchester Village by Pulitzer Prize winning historian Joseph Ellis.
Despite one blemish on his record — he exaggerated his participation in the military when it came to discussing his service in Vietnam in his classroom lectures, for which he acknowledged a lapse in judgment and was suspended from his professorship at Mt. Holyoke college for a year — Ellis is one of the superstars of the history business. He’s a great writer, and not just in terms of output. He’s written extensively about the American Revolutionary period, mining what would seem to have been a pretty exhausted shaft for new insights into what is arguably the most significant moment in the nation’s history. And he’s done it in an enjoyable, readable way that doesn’t sacrifice content.
The Revolutionary generation has my vote for the greatest American generation. Indeed, to digress — I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m getting really weary of all the “Greatest Generation” stuff heaped on the Depression-World War II generation. They probably are getting a little embarrassed by it too, if their legendary humility is any guide. Not to take anything away from their accomplishments, but every generation, I think, is great in its own way — each historical period brings forth different challenges that each generation in a leadership role has thrust upon it. I may be biased but I happen to think my own “Baby Boomer” generation — once celebrated, now seemingly responsible for all the world’s ills, will one day be once again recognized as a remarkable group of people who busted through the dead nonsense of the past and pointed the way to better attitudes towards all kinds of things. And, oh yeah, there’s all that other stuff, like personal computers and the Internet, that came into being on our watch.
This is a circular way of addressing the fact that if any generation deserves the accolade of ‘the greatest,” it’s arguably the Revolutionary War generation - the first Americans - Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Hamilton and the rest. Of course, age-wise they spanned several generations, but we think of them as being one group. When you think of what they accomplished — as Ellis guides us through in his latest book “American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic” — it stirs anew a sense of wonder. The odds of them successfully carrying out the Revolution seem in retrospect to have been laughably small. While all history, if only because it’s largely written by the winners, always seems to take on an air on inevitability, the American Revolution could easily have ended, at several points, far differently and less gloriously. This “what-if” game is a fascinating parlor game for history buffs, but it does help create a context for appreciating how amazing our Revolution really was.
Ellis cites two huge accomplishments of the Revolutionary generation — they were the first to successfully wage and win a war against Great Britain, the world’s biggest, baddest superpower of the time, and they were the first to create a democratic and large republic. The prevailing wisdom of the 18th century was that republican governments were viable only if smallish, city-state type affairs, not big countries like the 13 colonies created. We tend to take it for granted but every time I read an account of the Constitutional Convention I am struck anew by how amazing that was. The cluster of ideas, the compromises that made it possible, is truly one of the greatest stories every told.
Set against those successes are two large failures — the failure to point the way to ending slavery and the mishandling of the Native American question. The Founders said they didn’t want to deprive the “savages” of their land without some form of compensation, but that is exactly what happened. Washington considered that failure to be the greatest stain on his record. And they knew slavery was the evil seed that could one day unravel all their hard work and sacrifice.. The price was steep — more than 600,000 deaths by the next great generation of Americans — the Civil War generation. That’s a big price to pay. But as Ellis points out, it was probably inevitable. Slavery just wasn’t going to be done away with through legislative fiat. They hoped to contain it in the southeastern U.S. and have it wither away gradually. Instead, it went out with a big bloody bang, and then we lived for more than another 100 years with de facto segregation and only very recently, within the past 20-30 years, have we begun to overcome the legacy of racism in any kind of meaningful way.
Beyond being a great writer, Ellis is a gifted speaker, at turns funny, engaging, changing tones, calling on the students in the audience for questions, and clearly, prepped in advance by the student’s history teacher, joking about asking questions for extra credit. You can imagine him being just great in the classroom.
All in all, another great night at “First Wednesdays,” the lecture series sponsored by the Vermont Humanities Council, the Northshire Bookstore, the Green Mountain Academy for Lifelong Learning and the Mark Skinner Library. You can’t beat the setting either. The first Congregational Church is one of those places that oozes New England — you can almost feel the tug of history sitting in the pews where earlier generations sat for worship all the way back to - well, the Revolution. It’s perfect.
Especially the speaker speaking from the pulpit. Both Ellis and Frank Bryan, the UVM professor who spoke last month made some pretty good introductory ice breaking jokes about being Biblical or waiting for lightning to strike. It must be kind of cool to face the audience of “worshippers” and hold forth.

Posted by Andrew McKeever at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)