Further to my posts here and here about the resemblance of Barack Obama to previous Presidents, here is commentary by four US historians about Obama’s first 100 days. They cite, variously, his similarities to Lincoln, FDR, JFK, LBJ and Reagan. I still think he is closer to TR than to anyone else, in terms of policies, in terms of personal character, and in his use of the bully pulpit.
Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category
Page 15 of 16
Richard B. Cheney: belligerent incompetence
Andrew Sullivan, conservative:
It is very rare to get someone with the same stratospheric levels of arrogance and incompetence as you find in Dick Cheney. Let’s go to the tape: A war launched on false premises, a trillion dollar debt in a period of growth, a destruction of America’s moral standing, the loss of one major city (New Orleans) and the devastation of another (New York City), two horribly bungled military campaigns that have trapped his successors for decades, a political party decimated for a generation, his closest aide in jail for obstruction of justice, his own daughter and grand-child targeted by his own party as second-class citizens in the state they live in. And a war criminal. Did I miss anything?
Why is this man not laughed off every TV set he walks onto?”
Australian political language
Mention of former Australian Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, today brought to mind his successor as PM, Paul Keating. Journalist Mungo MacCallum’s great book, How to be a Megalomaniac, includes a list of the terms of abuse which Keating had used against his opponents during his time in politics (pp. 68-9):
harlots, sleazebags, frauds, immoral cheats, blackguards, pigs, mugs, clowns, boxheads, criminal intellects, criminals, stupid crooks, corporate crooks, friends of tax cheats, brain-damaged, loopy crims, stupid foul-mouthed grub, piece of criminal garbage, dullards, stupid, mindless, crazy, alley cat, bunyip aristocracy, clot, fop, gigolo, hare-brained, hillbilly, malcontent, mealy-mouthed, ninny, rustbucket, scumbag, scum, sucker, thug, dimwits, dummies, a swill, a pig sty, Liberal muck, vile constituency, fools and incompetents, rip-off merchants, perfumed gigolos, gutless spiv, glib rubbish, tripe and drivel, constitutional vandals, stunned mullets, half-baked crim, insane stupidities, champion liar, ghouls of the National Party, barnyard bullies, piece of parliamentary filth.”
As MacCallum notes, this listing is only of terms which Keating used in Federal Parliament, which of course has rules of decorum not applying in the rougher world outside.
Reference:
Mungo MacCallum[2002]: How to be a Megalomaniac. Sydney, Australia: Duffy & Snellgrove.
Ol' 57 Varieties
Yesterday, in a ceremony awarding prizes to a successful US Navy football team at the White House, President Obama greeted a fellow Hawaiian with a “hang loose” sign (aka the Shaka gesture), which was of course returned.
On the day before his Inauguration in January, an amateur video showed then-President-elect Barack Obama with his wife, greeting VIP guests at a concert held in his honour on the Mall, in Washington DC; many of these guests were black Americans, and Young Bazza spoke to them in a different accent, different tone of voice, and with different body language to his normal public persona. As a state congressman in Illinois, he once remarked to an aide that the folks he met upstate were just like his Kansan relatives. As is well-known, he was a big-city urban politician from Chicago, of a type that can be found throughout the North-East and in some cities elsewhere – think The Wire (Baltimore), or think larger-than-life city politicians from TR, Fiorello La Guardia, Richard Daley, John Lindsay, Ed Koch, Tip O’Neill, through to Rudy Giuliani and Cory Booker. He was also Editor of the Harvard Law Review, putting him into the intellectual A-league alongside people like Adlai Stevenson, Henry Kissenger, Sam Nunn and both Clintons.
Perhaps the key reason for Obama’s sudden rise to national prominence in the US is his ability to identify with people from all over the map, to make people feel that he is “one of us” in lots of different communities. In this he takes after “Ol’ 57 Varieties” himself, Teddy Roosevelt. Obama, of course, takes this to a new global level, with his family connections to Kenya and to Indonesia.
Two thoughts come to mind. The first is that several successful politicians have had backgrounds or career experiences that enable them to connect with many different communities in their home countries: Harold Wilson for example, who traveled the length and breadth of Britain in his 20s as a researcher for William Beveridge and for the Beveridge Commision; Eddison Zvobgo, another Harvard Law School graduate and Minister for Local Government in Robert Mugabe’s newly-independent Zimbabwe, who used the role to build a nationwide constituency; and Bob Hawke, Australian PM, who spent the main part of his career as first a researcher with and then President of the Australian Council of Trades Unions (the ACTU), a position which enabled him to travel widely, to meet people across the social spectrum, and to make connections internationally (eg, he negotiated with the USSR to allow greater Jewish emigration to Israel).
My second thought is that this provides us with another way to classify the various US Presidents. Some Presidents, like Obama, are post-industrial nomads, either not from one specific place or from several: TR, Hoover, Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan and Bush 41. Other Presidents are firmly perceived as being from one specific place: Lincoln, Taft, Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, FDR, Truman, JFK, LBJ, Carter, Clinton and Bush 43. It is interesting that the only nomads before Obama were Republicans.
White House Cosmopolitanism
Following the first seder ever held in the White House, The Guardian’s US correspondent, Michael Tomasky, has a post arguing that the Obamas “are our first cosmopolitan first couple.” Like the widespread myth that Barack Obama is the first urban US president (he is in fact the third), this is not the case. Before the Obamas, Presidents John F. Kennedy (mentioned briefly by Tomasky, albeit grudgingly), Herbert Hoover and Theodore Roosevelt were as cosmopolitan as the Obamas.
TR was born into a family that had already lived in Manhattan for over 200 years, and his grandfather was arguably the richest man in New York City. Roosevelt spent his 10th birthday in Europe, as part of a year-long Grand Tour his father had organized to educate the Roosevelt children, visiting Britain, the Low Countries, Germany, Switzerland and Italy. He married his second wife in London, while staying in Brown’s Hotel, perhaps the most expensive hotel in the city. While Governor of New York state, his dinner table included guests such as the Governor-General of Canada and a young English journalist named Winston S. Churchill. That TR traveled west to the Dakotas to find himself after the death of his first wife, and so gained a reputation as a courageous frontiersman (a reputation fully deserved) is only evidence of a wider cosmopolitanism, not a provincialism; for instance, his western experience reinforced in him a respect for others according to their values and achievements, regardless of their social status or ethnic origin. TR was the first US President to dine at the White House with a black American guest, Booker T. Washington in 1901, and he appointed the first Jewish-American to a Cabinet post, Oscar Strauss as Secretary of Commerce and Labor in 1906. And TR had such a tendency to claim ancestry from different ethnic groups (Dutch, German, Irish, among others), he was nick-named “Old 57 Varieties”.
Hoover, too, had traveled widely before he became President, working in the mines of Western Australia and in China, and seeking to alleviate the suffering of refugees in Europe during World War I. His fortune may have been ill-gotten, but he declined Lloyd George’s offer of a place in the Imperial War Cabinet during WW I in order to devote his efforts to raising money for war relief. Whatever he was – a scheming, get-rich-quick merchant before WW I, a do-nothing President paralyzed by ideology during the Great Depression, and full of self-righteous sanctimony afterwards – Hoover was certainly no provincial. Indeed, both Hoover and TR were geographically restless – people we’d call Post-Industrial Nomads if they had lived a century later.
And even some other recent Presidents, although perhaps not as cosmopolitan as Obama, were not as provincial as George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan. Eisenhower had seen overseas military service, in Europe during WWII, as had JFK, LBJ, Dick Nixon and George H. W. Bush, in Australia and the Pacific. Bush 41 had also been the US representative in China before becoming President. Obama is certainly exceptional, but he’s not unique.
Minority politics
The death this weekend of Janet Jagan (1920-2009), former President of Guyana (1997-1999), is a reminder that the election of President Barack Obama in the USA last November was not the first time that a democracy has elected a national leader who was a member of an ethnic minority. Born Janet Rosenberg, Janet Jagan was a ruthless Chicago pol, although far to the left of Young Bazza. Indeed, since no ethnic group in Guyana has a majority, one could argue that every leader which that country has elected democratically (which, sadly, is not all of Guyana’s leaders) has been an example of a majority electing a leader from a minority. Elsewhere in South America, Alberto Fujimori, a Peruvian of Japanese descent, was three times elected President of Peru from 1990-2000.
And there are other examples, if one widens the definition of ethnicity: Britain currently has a Scottish-born Prime Minister, its second Scottish-educated PM in succession, and disproportionately many Scots Cabinet Ministers. Both Britain and Australia have in the past elected as leaders people whose first language was not English, and both did so around the same time: Lloyd George in Britain (PM 1916-1922), and Billy Hughes in Australia (PM 1915-1923), were second-language speakers of English, both having Welsh as their mother-tongue. Australia’s current Deputy Prime Minister (and this week again Acting PM), Julia Gillard, is also Welsh-born. One of Australia’s most influential politicians in its first two decades, and founder of Canberra as the national capitol, was King O’Malley (1858-1953), who was almost certainly born in the USA. Both Australia and New Zealand had several Cabinet Ministers in their first decades born in the other country. And the Australian state of New South Wales has had a Premier born in Hungary (Nick Greiner, Premier 1988-1992), one born in the USA (Kristina Keneally, Premier 2009-2011), and one whose first language was Armenian (Gladys Berejiklian, Premier 2017- ). Sydney has had a Lord Mayor born in Poland (Leo Port, 1975-1978). Australia currently has a Federal Minister for Finance born in Belgium (Mathias Cormann).
And Britain, as perhaps befits a former colonial power, has had a succession of Cabinet ministers from abroad (although not all of these have been elected). Lloyd George offered a position in his cabinet during WW I to American businessman, Herbert Hoover (who declined the post). In both world wars, the British PM established an Imperial War Cabinet, in which the dominions were invited to be represented, although not all took up the invitation. In recent years, Britons have seen Ministers who were born or raised in Australia (Patricia Hewitt), Dominica (Baroness Patricia Scotland), Ghana (Paul Boateng), Guyana (Baroness Valerie Amos), Iraq (Ara Darzi, although of Armenian descent), Kenya & South Africa (Peter Hain), and Yemen (Keith Vaz). Malcolm Rifkind, Defence Minister and Foreign Minister under John Major (1992-1997), spent part of his early adult life in Africa (in Zimbabwe, then Rhodesia), as Major himself did also (in Nigeria).
“Only in America!”, as Yogi Berra might say.
POSTSCRIPT: Writing this, I forgot Bill Skate, Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea from 1997-1999; Julius Chan, Prime Minister 1980-1982 and 1994-1997; and Peter O’Neill, Primer Minister since 2011. All three men are of mixed race ancestry. And there was also Paul Berenger, Prime Minister of Mauritius from 2003-2005, a Christian leader in a majority Hindu nation, and Guy Scott, briefly President of Zambia (2014-2015). These have been the only Caucasian leaders of African nations post Independence or majority rule.
POSTSCRIPT 2 [2012-03-14]: And one could also mention the leaders of various places who were members of religious minorities, and whose elections sometimes excited controversy: JFK in the USA is the most famous. Before him, we had various Jewish premiers in predominantly Christian or gentile dominions: Julius Vogel (PM of New Zealand, 1873-1875), Vaiben Solomon (Premier, South Australia, 1899), Francis Bell (PM, New Zealand, 1925), David Marshall (Initial Chief Minister, Singapore, 1954-1956), Roy Welensky (PM, Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, 1956-1963), and John Key (PM, New Zealand, 2008-2016).
POSTSCRIPT 3 [2024-07-31]: Perhaps this is the place to mention Mr Stuart Comberbach, a white Zimbabwean diplomat, who has been a senior diplomat with the governments of successively Rhodesia, Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, and Zimbabwe since 1974. He has previously been the Zimbabwean ambassador to Italy and to Japan, and is currently the country’s ambassador to various UN agencies in Geneva. His first overseas posting, under the rebel Rhodesian Government of Ian Smith, was as leader of a representative trade office in Gabon from 1974 to 1979. Who knew Rhodesia had enough trade with Gabon to justify a permanent trade mission there?
And here is a list of people who served in more than one Parliament or Assembly.
A salute to Zdenek Mlynar
Continuing our series of heroes, I would like to honour Zdenek Mlynar (1931-1997). Mlynar was an idealistic Czech communist who, as the principal author of the Action Programme of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (KSC), was the key theoretician of the Prague Spring in 1968. Mlynar had earlier been selected by the party to study Marxist theory and law in Moscow in the 1950s, where he was a fellow student and friend of another young, idealistic communist, Mikhail Gorbachev. Upon his return to the CSSR, Mlynar worked within the KSC to increase democracy, both internally within the party and in public life, becoming one of the reformers around Alexander Dubcek in the mid 1960s.
After the invasion of the CSSR by forces of the Warsaw Pact in 1968, Mlynar refused to submit to the reimposition of stalinism (during the so-called “normalization” period), and was expelled from the KSC. After co-organizing and signing Charter 77, he was forced into exile. In contrast to the courage and integrity of Mlynar, of Vaclav Havel and of their fellow members of the Czechoslovak opposition, the man who is currently Czech President, Vaclav Klaus, kept quiet during this period.
After departing Moscow in 1955, Mlynar and Gorbachev met again next in 1967. When Gorbachev visited Prague in 1969, he was not permitted to see Mlynar. They did not then meet again until 1989. Mlynar was married to Rita Budinova (later Rita Klimova), the first post-Communist Ambassador from Czechoslovakia to the USA.
Archie Brown has noted that the reformers of communism in Czechoslovakia in 1968 were the same generation as those who reformed communism in the USSR twenty years later. In both cases, the reformers were people who were born in the 1920s and 1930s, and who thus came of age after the imposition of communism. Also, in both cases, the reformers were true believers in socialist ideas, and neither cynics nor opportunists. Unlike the situation in Hungary, Poland, and the DDR between 1945 and 1989, change to communism in the CSSR and the USSR came not from below but from above.
Past entries in this series are here.
Footnote: Not only were the reforms of Gorbachev driven, leninist-fashion, from the top. Charles Fairbanks [2008, pp. 64-65] has argued that there may be a direct link between the ideas of left-Stalinist Andrei Zhdanov (1896-1948), and Gorbachev’s reforms, via Finnish and Soviet politician Otto Kuusinen (1881-1964), Kuusinen’s protegé politician Yuri Andropov (1914-1984), and economists Aleksey Rumyantsev (1905-1993) and Aleksandr Yakovlev (1923-2005). Rumyantsev was founding editor of the international journal Problems of Peace and Socialism in Prague from 1958-1964, and the journal’s Russian editorial staff in this period had been selected by Kuusinen and Andropov. For example, Gorbachev’s close aide, Georgy Shakhnazarov (1924-2001), had twice worked for this journal in Prague, in between stints at the International Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU, working indirectly for Andropov, via Fedor Burlatsky (1927-2014).
References:
Charles H. Fairbanks [2008]: “The nature of the beast”. Chapter 6, pages 61-75, of Gvosdev [2008].
Nikolas K. Gvosdev (Editor) [2008]: The Strange Death of Soviet Communism: A Postscript. New Brunswick, NJ, USA: Transaction Publishers.
Mikhail Gorbachev and Zdenek Mlynar [2002]: Conversations with Gorbachev on Perestroika, The Prague Spring, and the Crossroads of Socialism. New York, USA: Columbia University Press. Translated by George Shriver, with a Foreword by Archie Brown.
Zdenek Mlynar [1980]: Night Frost in Prague: The End of Humane Socialism. London, UK: C. Hurst and Co.
Urban Precedents
In the excitement over the USA’s first black American President, some people have become over-excited. An example is Marbury, who claims Barack Obama is also the nation’s first urban President. This is simply not the case.
Although most US Presidents are creatures of the countryside or the suburbs, there have been at least two Presidents with as much claim to be urbanistas as does young Bam. Most recent was John F. Kennedy, raised in Boston and a sophisticated habitue of London, Washington and New York City before becoming President. Of course, as all rich kids of his time did, he spent summers sailing on the Cape or vacationing in Florida, but JFK was as urban as they come.
And before JFK, a century ago, there was Teddy Roosevelt, born and raised in Manhattan, and urban to the core. Of course he loved Nature (he could justly also claim the title of the country’s first Environmentalist President), and he decamped to the wilderness of the North Dakota Badlands to find himself after the death of his first wife. But this was a man who was such an urban-dweller that he took the job of President of the Police Commission of the New York City Police Department – the NYPD! – literally running to his office on the day of his appointment, according to the account of his friend, the journalist Lincoln Steffens. While in that post, Roosevelt spent his evenings walking the streets of Manhattan to meet his policemen on the beat:
T.R. went about at night with [journalist Jacob] Riis as his guide to see the police at work. He had some bizarre experiences. He caught men off post, talking together; he caught them in all sorts of misconduct and had funny, picturesque adventures, which Riis described to all of us [journalists] (so fair was he as a reporter) and which we all wrote to the amusement of newspaper readers. But what T.R. was really doing – the idea of Riis in proposing it – was to talk personally with the individual policemen and ask them to believe in him, in the law, which they were to enforce. T.R. knew, he said, the power they were up against, the tremendous, enduring power of organized evil, but he promised he would take care of them.”
Walking the streets of Manhattan at night is not the behaviour of a President Cornpone. Obama is the third urban President the USA has had, not the first.
Reference:
Lincoln Steffens [1931]: The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens. (New York, USA: Harcourt Brace and Company.)
Abraham Lincoln
This month is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln is not the offspring of a people’s revolution. The ordinary play of the electoral system, unaware of the great tasks it was destined to fulfill, bore him to the summit – a plebian, who made his way from stone-splitter to senator in Illinois, a man without intellectual brilliance, without special greatness of character, without exceptional importance – an average man of good will. Never has the New World scored a greater victory than in the demonstration that with its political and social organization, average men of good will suffice to do that which in the Old World would have required heroes to do!“
Karl Marx [1862-10-12]: “On events in North America.” Die Presse, Vienna.
A plan for infrastructure projects
While on the subject of infrastructure, and the UK Government’s lack of any apparent action to start new infrastructure projects despite the economic crisis, here is a draft plan of action:
- Start with a national competition for suggestions for new infrastructure projects. People and businesses in regional communities have loads of ideas for projects – should anyone in Westminster bother to listen. Perhaps allow 1 month for this, so Month 1 is spent soliciting proposals. Creating a press release to announce the competition and a web-site to receive suggestions could be done within a day.
- In the meantime (also during Month 1), create a temporary government agency like Australia’s national infrastructure agency, to receive these proposals and do a preliminary filtering in terms of (say): employment impact, wider business impact, social impact, cost, and long term potential for follow-on benefits. A leading management consulting firm or two could be used to detail the criteria, assess all the proposals against the criteria (tedious but necessary work), and produce this long listing, winnowing down from (say) hundreds of proposals to (say) 50. Month 2 could be devoted to this effort.
- Then, have an appointed national committee, comprising politicians from all three major national parties, people from business and industry, the trades unions, people and politicians from the regions (say about 20 people) assess the 50 long-listed proposals and winnow them down to (say) 10. This should be done in closed session in one, dedicated, all-day-and-all-night effort, over (say) 7 days. We want the committee to bond, because we want their conclusions to be unanimous.
- Then, prepare detailed technical and financial plans for each project on the shortlist. This could be achieved within (say) 21 days. As with the earlier stages, this work could be undertaken with the assistance of consulting and/or engineering firms, major corporations or banks – there are currently lots of bankers at a loose end, I hear. Hell, I’d even volunteer for this myself, because of the fun it would be and the importance of the work.
- Then, fund the final 10 projects immediately and start digging ground (or spinning fibre, or whatever). These projects should be give short, sharp names (eg, Fibre-up; Fast-Track) and short descriptors, so that every person over 16 can identify with them, and support them. Insist that each team’s management produce detailed progress reports online each month, with (say) quarterly public hearings. We want this work done, done well and done properly.
Total time, from start of campaign to shoveling: 3 months.
Of course, I realize getting major projects to shovel-ready normally takes longer than 3 months. THIS FACT SHOULD NOT STOP ALL THESE PROJECTS STARTING SOMETHING WITHIN 3 MONTHS. A key task will be creating semi-permanent, quasi-independent parastatal bodies (quangos) to run each project, to acquire land, employ people, etc. That can all be done after the projects start, since the first main purpose of these projects is to boost aggregate demand and employment in the short run. Our models here should be the USA’s Tennessee Valley Authority and Australia’s Snowy Mountains Scheme, updated for the Internet age.
Not all infrastructure projects need to involve alteration to the earth’s physical landscape. My own proposal would be to create a major national organization – part-research lab, part-investment bank – to identify, to prototype, to seed, and to invest-in business ideas for future-generation Internet applications, starting from about Web 6.0 (whatever that will be) and upwards – a Xerox Parc for 21st-century e-services, with an investment budget of (say) USD 5 billion or so to start. I would start this with public funding, with the aim of privatizing it once it becomes successful.
And (added 2009-02-12), if 3 months is too long (and it is), here are three potential major national infrastructure projects suggested by journalist Andrew Rawnsley:
- A national high-speed rail network (I would call this Fast-Track, or similar)
- A national, super-fast broadband fibre optic network (Fibre-Up), and
- A large-scale renewable energy production program, connected to the National Electricity Grid (Green-Power-to-go!).
There would be nothing stopping the Government spending (say) GBP 1 million on each of these to prepare outline feasibility and financial plans, with the aim of launching one of them within a month.
Building a national fibre broadband network without thinking also about what would run on it would not be sensible, which is why I propose the Web6.0 idea above. But a little creativity could generate lots of proposals for non-physical infrastructure, which would create UK employment here and now, train people, stimulate demand, and leave something behind for future generations, for example:
- Digitizing the contents of ALL Britain’s art galleries and museums, something which could employ artists, photographers, and lots of those unemployed media studies and IT graduates.
- Digitizing the contents of the British Library, the main University Libraries and the national archives.
- Digitizing ALL past census records.
- Recording the life story of every citizen over 65.
- Recording a performance at every live music venue in the country, including pubs and churches.
- Producing online visitor guides to every locality in the country, annotated by people resident in the locality.
- Producing a digital record (films, interviews, oral histories, photos, etc) of every factory facing downsizing or closure, with a record of the skills and networks being lost.
It should not need saying that all this digitized information, if paid for from the public purse, should be made freely accessible online. These projects could be our generation’s equivalent of the Works Progress Administration. I am sure there are many more ideas, both sensible and wacky, than these.
Well, Mr Brown? What are you waiting for? How about some vision? If not these projects, then what? If not now, then when?