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In this long and ugly campaign, I am getting tired of the suggestion that President Obama should imitate Lyndon Baines Johnson.
By that theory, Obama should have long ago grabbed his opponents and saboteurs by some vulnerable part of their anatomy and squeezed until they cooperated. This thoughtful and active president has been catching hell for four years for the crime of PWB – Presiding While Black. We all know that race is the subtext for this campaign. Obama has had to deal with congressional leaders with the smirks of southern sheriffs and South African apartheid enforcers back in the bad old days. Just the other day, when that great American Colin Powell endorsed Obama, John Sununu made the despicable suggestion that Powell was only doing it for racial reasons. (Piers Morgan, an outsider currently working in American television, did not know the territory well enough to push Sununu on this.) Obama would only have made it worse by morphing into LBJ. Lately I’ve been talking to veterans who watched their companions die in Vietnam, and when they lived long enough to read memoirs and histories they discovered Johnson and his pals had known the war was not working. Yes, give credit to Johnson for pushing through civil-rights and anti-poverty legislation, for muscling the southern tier, his own constituency. He was also a bully who could not face his grotesque mistake. Obama did fine in his second and third debates against a candidate who swerves all over the place, as Colin Powell said. Reason and record -- and dignity -- will win out.
bruce pcken
10/27/2012 02:10:37 am
george,
bruce picken
10/27/2012 02:13:55 am
not sure what happened, but the 'l' in lament ended up before the 'o' in often in the last paragraph of my incredibly insightful comment.....
Suzanne
10/27/2012 02:59:33 am
George, I totally agree about PWB. It seems to be the under current that fuels a lot of people's hatred of Obama.
George Vecsey
10/27/2012 03:54:55 am
Suzanne?? It stunned me how quick a segment of Boehner-McConnell-Cantor America decided they hated Obama. Magical. Didn't like the cut of his jib (nautical term) or something.
Brian Savin
10/27/2012 06:29:54 am
I'll leave any remnant hopes and dreams about our current President alone, and simply be disappointed that the Governor does not find the present political climate conducive to serious political discussion. Instead, I'll turn my attention to the past. LBJ impressed me as a consummate politician, with his eye focused completely on ego. That is the only way I, at least, can explain the Civil Right Act and Vietnam can be in the same man. Very different from the now late George McGovern. The man from South Dakota may or may not have made a better President than President Nixon, who I believe on domestic matters was the last true inventive and progressive President we have had, but McGovern was full of honest "Prairie Wisdom." We had terrible problems back then, but at least also a very few public servants who articulated beliefs and positions that actually went to the heart of our problems.
george vecsey
10/27/2012 11:17:24 am
Brian, I totally agree about mcGovern. The tributes to him were touching on Friday. Thanks for your always-thoughtful comments. GV
Brian Savin
10/27/2012 06:33:33 am
edit: "HOW the Civil Rights Act....."
Sam Guttenplan
10/27/2012 07:05:16 am
George, I too agree about PWB, but I think that the reason is more subtle than the overt racism that is, sadly, all too easy to find in the US. The only explanation that I can give for the closeness of this election - given the clear inadequacies (I am being kind) of the Republican candidate - is that some in the electorate who do not consider themselves 'racist' in any ordinary sense, do not realise that they are nonetheless prejudiced. It would take too long to make out the case for this in detail, but the basic point is straightforward. These people simply discount - literally, they count less - much of Obama's character and his accomplishments because of his colour. Difficult to put into words because that might make it seem reasonable, but the idea is that because of an unreflective prejudice that is more widespread than racism, they cannot actually see what Obama has done and how he has brought the kind of dignity of which you wrote to his office. (This inability to see extends to women as well as black people, but that is another story.) If a historical and apolitical narrative of the past four years could be written which didn't mention the colour of the incumbent, and put alongside a narrative of what the current opponent has to offer, I doubt that there would be any contest.
Brian Savin
10/28/2012 04:39:30 am
Oh dear. 10/28/2012 05:22:14 am
SORRY--FIRST POSTED INCOMPLETE!! 10/28/2012 01:52:13 pm
George 10/28/2012 01:58:20 pm
I have been having difficulty posting my complete message. In hope of getting it all in, I've split it into two posts.
Gene Palumbo
11/2/2012 03:15:59 pm
George has a column in tomorrow's Times (i.e. Saturday, Nov. 3, page D3 of the New York edition) on the decision to call off the marathon: "Wisely Stepping Aside in a Bombarded City," Comments are closed.
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QUOTES
Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online. The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal…. After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness. The progress stems mostly from three factors: First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot. Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.) Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year. “Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.” That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.” That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data. One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines. Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks. Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths. The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions. Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately Republican and white. Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.) *** From the great Maureen Dowd: As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop. But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels." --- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing. *** "Putting out the paper," we called it. Much more than nostalgia. ---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html Categories
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