Think This Is A Wild Election?

This is a rough, tough election. No doubt about it, but there have been crazier ones in U.S. History.
by Charlie Leck

A Washington Post editorial (15 September 2016) calls Donald Trump a scam artist. I don’t think any presidential candidate in the last one hundred years, has been described so harshly as Donald Trump is being pictured by many leading news organizations.

What I think we need to look at is why so many, many potential voters continue to favor Donald Trump for this job. Is that a reflection on the America we live in and the character of its people?

I wonder how so many people can buy into such irrational promises from any candidate. Do they actually know that the promises are impossible to fulfill and just want to go with the guy because he is such a radical change from traditional candidates?

There are many questions like that in my mind. I am hoping that some of the investigations by both news organizations and legal authorities will make serious progress in the next 30 days in order to answer some of the dizzying questions about candidate Trump. It appears his family foundation is something of a hoax. This foundation received donations from other charitable givers and gave it away as if it were from Trump’s personal fortune. It also purchased, for $20,000, a six-foot painting of Mr. Trump. The foundation also bid $12,000 on a football helmet autographed by Tim Tebow. And, there is much more we don’t know about Trump’s rental policies in many of his New York City apartment facilities. And, former students of Trump University are coming out of the wood work every day, drawing vivid depictions of the fraud that went on in that Trump program.

There are so many things we can’t quite figure out about Mr. Trump without a close look at his federal income tax filings. It certainly appears that Mr. Trump is never going to give us the right to do that.

There is so much “evidence” of possible fraud about Mr. Trump’s activities over the last three decades; and yet, it is Hillary Clinton that Donald Trump keeps calling crooked and fraudulent.

What a campaigner the man is! He’s like a boxer throwing the wildest of punches, hoping one or two of them will land. He makes stuff up like the best of fiction writers.

I’d like to say this is the weirdest campaign for the office in American History. That wouldn’t be true. Prior to the twentieth century there were a number of very crude and rude campaigns. The first campaign of Abe Lincoln is a good example. Lincoln was falsely called all kinds of vile things by the opposing press and the opposing candidate.

The second campaign of John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson in 1828 is a good example of enormous political sleaze. Though Jackson’s party was called “The Democrats,” it much more closely resembled today’s Republican Party because they had a strong commitment to individual liberties, very limited government and heavily favored strong states’ rights. Jackson was known as “Old Hickory” He was a southern man of humble means and he was orphaned early in life. He was, however, a military hero.

John Quincy Adams was the complete opposite of that; for he was the son of one of the nation’s founders and, as a man of wealth and privilege, he had traveled the world and spoke a number of languages. “Erudite” is the word that comes to mind when trying to describe JQA.

Adams had won the 1824 election battle against Jackson by the slimmest of margins, actually losing the popular vote but winning when the electoral votes were in his favor.

Adams had little trouble exploiting a rather questionable reputation that Jackson carried. An extraordinarily strong temper was one of Jackson’s weakness (remember, he was the man of a number of duels). Jackson had also disobeyed direct military orders in 1819 and had invaded Spanish Florida in spite of the orders not to. Jackson also had to fight charges that he was an adulterer.

But, Jackson fought hard and called Adams a man of corruption and pointed to a number of possible examples. Of course, the south hated Adams and loved Jackson. The good church-going people of the south also accused Adams of owning a pool table and of gambling at card games! It seemed, Jackson claimed, that the pool table had been paid for with government money.

The pressure in that campaign was so intense that Adams withdrew from actual appearances, but many northern newspapers took up the campaign for him. One newspaper reported that Jackson’s mother was “a common prostitute!” The paper also claimed that the woman ended up marring “a mulatto man” and Jackson was one of the children of that marriage.

In the end, Jackson took 56 percent of the vote in 1828 and 178 electoral votes were tallied for him; while Adams received only 83 such votes. Jackson was so angered by Adams that he refused to make the traditional visit to the outgoing president on the day of his inauguration.

One of my favorite stories about early political campaigns comes from the Lincoln/Douglas fights and debates in 1860. Out on the campaign trail, Douglas was to call Lincoln one of the ugliest men of all time – “horrid-looking… sooty and scoundrelly… a cross between a nutmeg dealer, the horse-swapper and the nightman.” Stephen Douglas had no room to talk – himself being 5’4’’ tall and the same measurement wide.

Smithsonian Magazine listed the 1876 election campaign between Samuel Jones Tilden and Rutherford B. Hayes as one of the dirtiest campaigns ever. Tilden was boldly called, over and over, “a briber, a thief,” and “a drunken syphilitic.” It was documented that southern Democrats prevented thousands of eligible blacks from casting votes all across the southern states. Neither candidate got enough electoral votes to win and a constitutional crisis developed. It wasn’t until early in 1877 that a compromise took place – it gave Hayes the presidency in exchange for removing all federal troops from the South (and that, in essence, ended Reconstruction.)

When I first read, many years ago, about the history of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, I was completely taken by this remarkable comment by Abraham Lincoln. I wrote it down carefully and tucked it in a special “quotation notebook” that I keep. This if what Abe Lincoln said in one of those debates:

“That is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, ‘You work and toil and earn bread, and I'll eat it.’ No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.”                                                                                                        [in the debate at Alton, Ill on Oct 15, 1858]

 ________________________________

Why not become a follower? If you read my blog regularly, why not become a follower? All you have to do is click in the upper right hand corner (Join this Site) and establish a simple means of communication. Then you'll be informed every time a new blog is posted here. If all that's confusing, here's Google's explanation of how to do it! If you don’t want to post comments on the blog, but would like to communicate with me about it, send me an email if you’d like.

Lincoln

I saw the movie yesterday with two terribly interesting and compelling companions. I’m glad I was with someone who understood that a general, personal withdrawal and some quietness was required at the film’s conclusion.

by Charlie Leck

Sam knew I was extremely moved by the film. I was still fighting back emotions as we filed out of the theater.

“I can’t wait to read your blog tomorrow,” Sam said, as we walked through the theater lobby toward the exit doors. After that, he remained quite silent as we walked to the car, uttering a nearly silent farewell to Bert.

“No, this was too big for me to write about it,” I replied very quietly, after thinking about it.

“Not for you,” he said. “I’ll bet you write about it.”

“No! How do you even begin to explain such a film?”

Yet, I knew he’d thrown me something like a challenge and I sat around last night thinking about it. I sipped on some scotch that I had poured over a mountain of clear ice cubes and thought about it. I stared at the newly decorated Christmas tree and thought about Lincoln! How could one possibly explain such a big movie – such incredible storytelling and such a wondrous recreation of historical reality?

I mean… What do I mean?

The cameras and the people who worked them and directed them seemed as intruders on reality. They carried me back into history and to moments that I’d wondered about as I read the historians who tried to explain them – Doris Kearns Goodwin, in A Team of Rivals, and Gore Vidal in Lincoln.

But, I can’t explain the power of this movie to you! I sit here thinking about it and I begin to tremble when I think about the man – Lincoln. What can I write that will be meaningful?

Here’s what I know!
The movie tried to capture a period in Lincoln’s presidency – a moment when he was trying to get the 13th amendment to the U.S. Constitution approved by the U.S. Congress.

What was it the New York Times said about the movie – praise that got me so excited about seeing it?

“The squalor and vigor, the glory and corruption of the Republic in action have all too rarely made it onto the big screen.

“There are exceptions, of course, and one of them is Steven Spielberg’s splendid “Lincoln,” which is, strictly speaking, about a president trying to scare up votes to get a bill passed in Congress. It is of course about a lot more than that, but let’s stick to the basics for now. To say that this is among the finest films ever made about American politics may be to congratulate it for clearing a fairly low bar. Some of the movie’s virtues are, at first glance, modest ones, like those of its hero, who is pleased to present himself as a simple backwoods lawyer, even as his folksy mannerisms mask a formidable and cunning political mind.” [A.O. Scott, NY Times, 8 November 2012]

To me, it was about that something more that A.O. Scott mentions. It was about a moment in history – a moment, mind you, that might pass without decisive action or, through great moral belief and perseverance, might display the awesomeness of human character. Lincoln! Seward! Thaddeus Stevens! Oh, my, what men!

A.O. Scott says: “…Daniel Day-Lewis, who eases into a role of epic difficulty as if it were a coat he had been wearing for years.” A friend of mine spoke to me about the movie in the days before I saw it. “Daniel Day-Lewis nailed it,” he said with such total enthusiasm it was as if he were proclaiming a moment of epiphany! And, yes he did – Mr. Lewis, I mean! He absolutely nailed it and captured a Lincoln who was, to me and the other viewers around me, so real that it was as if we were sitting with him in his White House, listening to his humble tales born out of his experiences in Kentucky, Indiana and Southern Illinois. Such little stories with such far reaching morals to them!

“Above all, he gives them voice. His Lincoln speaks in a reedy drawl that provides a notable counterpoint to the bombastic bellowing of some of his allies and adversaries. (John William’s score echoes this contrast by punctuating passages of orchestral grandeur with homey scraps of fiddle, banjo and parlor piano.). [A.O. Scott, NY Times, 8 November 2012]

The screenwriter is Tony Kushner. I know nothing about him. My companions at the movie theatre were enthused and delighted when they saw that he had written the script. It was quite brilliant and excruciatingly realistic. Lincoln, Kushner makes both eloquent and down-to-earth folksy. How could a man tell tales so well of George Washington’s portrait in a toilet (WC) in Great Britain and utter so compellingly those words at Gettysburg, or deliver the magnificent chord so vibrantly in the Second Inaugural Address? Kushner, Spielberg and Day-Lewis deliver just that to us in startling reality. Brilliantly, to boot!

I have never sat through “a full-length, feature film,” as we used to call them in the old days, that so grasped me and held me tight from beginning to end. As I so boldly said in the opening to this blog, I was drawn back into the reality and moment of history and allowed to be a living, contemporary and witness right at hand.

Sally Field allowed me to have great sympathy and even compassion for the bedeviled Mary Todd Lincoln. No mother, no wife, no woman should have to endure the agony and great personal expenditures paid by Mrs. Lincoln.

Tommy Lee Jones was brilliant as Congressman Thaddeus Stevens. He was put on a grand stage and given the opportunity to play a complex and well-spoken, sharp-tongued character. He grasped the opportunity and delivered a forceful performance with such reality that I forgot it was digital images I was watching.

The gorilla in the room, in this entire story, and that which provides the compelling conflicts, confrontations and great debates, is the institution of slavery in America and whether it can be allowed to stand at the conclusion of the Great Civil War that was fought over this very question: Can a State be a State within the Union, but defy the compelling heart and soul of the Constitution of the United States that cries out that “all men are created equal!” All men!

The film is about the question of slavery and how it shall be abolished. Clearly, some dynamic northern politicos decide that it must go before peace treaties are consummated. However, the North is divided about the question. Is the black man truly the equal of the ruling white men? Is the black man equal? Is he? The question lingers there and probes at us and at the characters in the story with a sharpness that is frightening. You are smacked with it again and again! Is he?

Spielberg opens the doors to the House of Representatives and to the White House and allows us a view of the political process in all its unseemly reality – and that is incredibly dramatic and forceful. It is also dirty and corrupt and unwholesome. Yet, it is beautiful because the ends do seem, in this case, to justify the means.

Enough, read the NY Times review by Mr. Scott. Then, if you haven’t already, get your tired old ass out there and sit in a grand, big-screen theater and become an actual witness to one of the most important historical moments in all of time.

If you don’t get it yet, here is my message in total bluntness: “God, I loved this movie!”

_________________________

Why not become a follower?
If you read my blog regularly, why not become a follower? All you have to do is click in the upper right hand corner and establish a simple means of communication. Then you'll be informed every time a new blog is posted here. If all that's confusing, here's Google's explanation of how to do it! If you don’t want to post comments on the blog, but would like to communicate with me about it, send me an email if you’d like.

Presidents Should Call Us to Greatness

The presidential campaign has an ugly, selfish and uncaring tone to it. It should be calling on Americans to be great and caring!
by Charlie Leck

David Gerson, today, in a column in the Washington Post, called Republicans away from mindless libertarianism and back to a healthy conservatism. He concluded his column by quoting gentle, old Abe Lincoln, who thought everyone deserved “an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.”

Well, that quotation got me thinking and remembering. I had an incredible old professor in college. His name was Harry Savage and he could read lines from the great Greek playwrights, from Shakespeare or from Abraham himself and make you think you were right there at the original expression of the words. So, I closed my eyes and remembered dear Doctor Savage and I heard President Lincoln speaking to the Congress of the United States of America. Try it! Listen for the voice of Abe himself as you read the following…

“It is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men – to lift artificial weights from all shoulders – to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all – to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life. Yielding to partial, and temporary departures, from necessity, this is the leading object of the government for whose existence we contend.”

Wait! What?

Old Abe said it! It was not I.

“The leading object of government… is to elevate the condition of men – to lift artificial weights from all shoulders – to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all – to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life.”

Oh, my!

What Mitt Romney said to the gathered wealthy at that cocktail party is so far to the opposite end of political purpose from the statement made above by President Lincoln that it leaves me only shaking my head in pity for America if that is what we have become. I must believe that we have not.

I have got to believe, or it is a tragedy, that America is still the land that welcomes “the huddled masses yearning to be free.”

The rabble-rousing, I think, of the Tea Party and the libertarians has begun to ring hollow and sound terribly, terribly selfish. There is a certain mindlessness in both political philosophies of which real, old fashioned Americans are starting to tire. America is not a selfish nation. Great Presidents – really great and revered leaders – called Americans to rise up in times of distress, to help their brothers and sisters so that we might all share in the wonders of the shining seas and the amber waves of grain.

Franklin Roosevelt, in one of the most tragic moments in the nation’s life, called out to it: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself!”

John Kennedy, in his inaugural address: “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country!”

Dwight Eisenhower, in his farewell address: “We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings; that those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.”

Enough of that! This is the point: Presidents must call Americans away from selfishness and not to it. Presidents must dare us to be great and giving.

That was not the tenor or the tone of Mitt Romney’s words when he spoke to those gathered in that Boca Raton mansion. That was the fearful cry of the Tea Party. That was the selfishness of the libertarian. As Gerson says…

“In fact, the video confirmed an existing stereotype of Romney and Republicans as wealthy white businessmen, clinking wine glasses while bemoaning the irresponsibility of the help.” [David Gerson, Washington Post]

And, a bit later Gerson went on to write…

“Yet a Republican ideology pitting the ‘makers’ against the ‘takers’ offers nothing. No sympathy for our fellow citizens. No insight into our social challenge. No hope of change. This approach involves a relentless reductionism. Human worth is reduced to economic production. Social problems are reduced to personal vices. Politics is reduced to class warfare on behalf of the upper class.

“A few libertarians have wanted this fight ever since they read Atlas Shrugged as pimply adolescents. Given Romney’s background, record and faith, I don’t believe that he holds this view. I do believe that Republicans often parrot it, because they lack familiarity with other forms of conservatism that include a conception of the common good.

“But there really is no excuse. Republican politicians could turn to Burkean conservatism, with its emphasis on the ‘little platoons’ of civil society. They could reflect on the Catholic tradition of subsidiarity, and solidarity with the poor. They could draw inspiration from Tory evangelical social reformers such as William Wilberforce or Lord Shaftesbury. Or they could just read Abraham Lincoln, who stood for ‘an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.’

“Instead they mouth libertarian nonsense, unable to even describe some of the largest challenges of our time.”

That, dear readers, says it all.

I want my President to call America back to its greatness… “for the dignity of man and the destiny of Democracy!”

President Lyndon Johnson, in urging Congress to approve the Voting Rights Act: “I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of Democracy. I urge every member of both parties, Americans of all religions and of all colors, from every section of this country, to join me in that cause.”

_________________________

Why not become a follower?
If you read my blog regularly, why not become a follower? All you have to do is click in the upper right hand corner and establish a simple means of communication. Then you'll be informed every time a new blog is posted here. If all that's confusing, here's Google's explanation of how to do it! If you don’t want to post comments on the blog, but would like to communicate with me about it, send me an email if you’d like.