That's Debatable: The Second Presidential Debate

Another big debate tonight for the candidates running for president of the United States and this one is just as important as the first. Things are especially urgent for Republican nominee John McCain who didn’t come across well in the first debate and who’s numbers have been dropping along with the stock market ever since. In the last few weeks, we’ve seen polls turn as quickly as a quarter horse in a rodeo, so for Barak Obama the debate also has significance. As Americans know, it is the vote in each state that counts, not the public opinion polls.

Reporter Liz Sidoti says that Barak Obama has an opportunity tonight to: “… Show some emotion and seal the deal with voters still struggling to see him as president.” If I were coaching him, I’d use the admonition an old news director of mine used to direct at one talented but slow-moving anchor: “Energy! Energy! Energy!” Obama has a tendency to look like Perry Como, as if he’s singing his song while dozing. In the case of John McCain, Sidoti’s analysis is, “When he’s on his game, McCain is witty and charming … when he’s off, McCain can come across cranky, surly and prone to gaffes.” America is not going to elect a grumpy old man. Those guys are only funny in the movies.

For my part I would like to see one or both of the candidates honestly repudiate the truly reprehensible behavior we’ve seen from banking and investment CEOs in the past few years. Honest outrage, that’s what I’m looking for. I’m speaking, for example, of men such as Richard Fuld, the former CEO of Lehman Brothers, who testified before Congress yesterday. Since the year 2000, Fuld has taken home more than $484 million dollars in compensation, and now his company is bankrupt. How can that be possible, not to mention legal for a firm charged with investing the money of others? I don’t want to hear any more promises tonight about the things my government is going to give me. What the government appears to have given us lately is what’s politely known as the shaft. The one I’m going to root for is the one who shows the most understanding of that and the greatest inclination to make that impossible in the future.

The Associated Press says at least ten percent of the electorate remains undecided and the assumption is that these debates can sway that vote. I don’t know how much the debates help, but I know they can hurt. In the last debate I thought McCain made a pretty poor showing, and I’m inclined to like him. But when Obama spoke, McCain smiled a mean smile and when McCain himself spoke he seemed rattled and inarticulate. We don’t need to hear that McCain didn’t win any “Miss Congeniality” prizes during his years on Capitol Hill. Is that supposed to be a recommendation? John McCain needs to look at old tapes of Ronald Reagan and learn how to be charming even when he’s disagreeing with an opponent. As Winston Churchill put it; “When you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.”

From My Front Porch in Florida

There was a sky full of rain this morning in Central Florida when I stepped out to pick up the paper. The morning newspaper in America is a fading ritual. There is so little news in it and so little paper (not to mention so little staff left in newspaper newsrooms) it continues in my life mostly as a ritual. I need to have something to do that engages my mind (and is quiet) while I drink my coffee and come to life again. And please, no talking right away.

What there was of the paper today was filled with articles and commentary about America’s economic problems and about America’s upcoming presidential election and the two subjects are intertwined. The new President of the United States will be faced with a recession right off the bat and it may even be a Great Recession—or worse. Everybody has been interviewed on the subject from former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan to former Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin, and the only thing everyone can agree on it that it was the fault of the other guy.

The truth is not all of this was done to Americans. Some of it was done by us to ourselves. Our parents and grandparents—the members of the Greatest Generation—taught us thrift and self sacrifice and we learned very little of either. We decided they were square and naïve and our way—wanting it all now, and paying for it all later—was a better way to do things. And that’s what we have. A whole lot of things. And now the check has come due.

I’m as guilty as the next person. My life is filled with far too many things and far too little sacrifice and thrift. When I moved last summer, for the first time in a decade, just going through all the things was a huge job. In the end, I was able to dispose of about fifty percent of my stuff, and though I still have too much the things that remain at least have value to me. Nowadays, I’m trying to follow this William Morris philosophy: “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”

In the end, things aren’t very important. The mystery writer Agatha Christie had a really bad time the summer her mother died. She had the sad task of sorting through the things that remained at her family’s once prosperous estate in Torquay, as she writes in her autobiography:

"For the last four or five years all kinds of rubbish had accumulated: my grandmother’s things; all the things that my mother had been unable to cope with and had locked away. There had been no money for repairs; the roof was falling in; and some of the rooms were dripping with rain. My mother had lived at the end in only two rooms … It was frightful: the moth-eaten garments, Grannie’s old trunks full of her old dresses, all the things that nobody had wanted to throw away but had now got to be disposed of … The schoolroom, which had been the scene of so many happy days in my youth, was now one vast box room: all the trunks and boxes that Grannie could not cram into her bedroom had gone there."

Christie is such a good writer you can almost see the moths flying out of the trunks as she opens them. It was an awful time and it might have been better if there hadn’t been so many things. It makes me think of my parents home with some concern!

A friend of mine, who is a social worker on a fixed income, lives in a pretty neighborhood near a local private college. Next door to her is a house that is often rented to students. This summer she called me and asked me if I would come over and help her put her computer and printer back together. As it turns out all she really needed was to have some help plugging them into one another, the surge protector, and the wall—and I was happy to help her. When I got to her house, she showed me a new computer table and chair the students next door had left out on the curb for the trash men. I guess the kids were headed off for summer vacation and didn’t want the trouble of moving their furniture. But the things weren’t junk! The table was expensive and the chair large and covered in leather and rocked back and forth like one of those ritzy executive chairs. The things were almost unused and together they were worth several thousand dollars. Their abandonment on the curb seemed to me a metaphor for America’s self indulgence and waste. Of course, this is just my two cents worth and what with the falling value of the dollar, you can calculate for yourself the value of my words.

Old What's-Her-Name

Just to keep us all humble, after I wrote the blog yesterday about the letter from my father in which he wrote "I love you," my sister called. She's in California keeping her eye on things for a few days and on the way to the restaurant, Marie Callender's, where she was taking my Mom and Dad for lunch to celebrate their 64th wedding anniversary, my Dad said, "I sure wish Robin were here." Not thirty minutes later my Dad said to my Mom: "What is the name of that girl I was telling you about who drives so well?" "Robin?" my mother asked. "Ah yes, that's right," he said. He does love me, I know that. But he can't always remember my name!

You have to remind yourself it isn't the man who has forgotten your name, it is the disease. Another example: my Mom's name is Faye, and one day a few months ago when my father was in rehab after a fall I kissed him goodbye at the end of a visit and started to leave. "Wait, wait, wait," he said and I turned back. "Who is Faye's husband?" He had a look of real concern on his face. I pointed at him and spoke so he could read my lips: "You are." "Okay, okay, okay." He smiled. He was just tring to keep things straight.

Letter From My Father

I got a letter from my father yesterday. This won’t sound remarkable to a lot of people, but it is to me. I live on the opposite side of America from my father, and since, at 89, he is now profoundly deaf, we can’t talk with one another on the telephone. He also has Alzheimer’s disease, and though he is still in the mild to moderate stage of it, writing a letter is really hard for him. I’ve seen him do it when I’m visiting him: it takes all his concentration. He writes a draft on a legal pad he has in the kitchen drawer, and then he asks my mother to correct it for him. Then he gets his pad of lined stationery and carefully copies it out. I’m his youngest daughter and even now with all his handicaps he wants to be in touch and that means everything to me.

Dear Robin,
Thank you for the letters you write. You don’t know how much I appreciate them. I also appreciate your calls. [My mother tells him about these.] Please keep writing and calling. I love you.

I gave our neighbor Mickey the picture you sent. I know he appreciates it though he is pretty quiet about it. [I sent Dad a picture of him with the neighbor’s dog, a friendly yellow Lab called Sunny, taken ten years ago. Sunny is now old and limping, a little bit like my Dad, and he still loves it when Sunny hobbles across the street to visit him.]

I do the same old not much of anything but your mother does so much for me it is great. I know I am loved and I am grateful for it all. I just wish I could do something to show my appreciation. Please write soon.
Love,
Dad

What my father doesn’t realize is that a letter like this one is all the appreciation I need. For most of his life, my father was a quiet, steady, practical man, not inclined to say “I love you” to anyone but my Mom. He’s an engineer and he saw the world in terms of its straightforward structure. He spent his life working hard. He saved his money. He invested it wisely. He did as my mother asked him. He sent my sister and me to college. He bought few luxuries. He paid his taxes. And he said very little about what he thought.

One of the mixed blessings of his disease is that he now says exactly what he thinks, the minute he thinks it. “What a shame,” he said to me one day as we walked down the driveway getting him some exercise. “What’s a shame?” I said. “That woman there,” (he nodded his head toward a plump seventyish woman walking down the street, getting her exercise). “It’s a shame for a woman to be shaped like that.” It made me smile. He may be eighty nine years old and deaf and losing his reason, but he still notices the shape of a woman!

The disease gives him strange hallucinations, especially first thing in the morning. One morning at breakfast he said to me, “Who is the king’s consort?” I looked up from the newspaper, not sure what was on his mind and slowly pointed at my mother. “Faye? No,” he said. “She’s the queen. I want to know who is the king’s consort?” After I had asked him several questions, I began to see that he had awakened believing he was running a kingdom, and he was trying to figure out who was going to help him do this. I use an improvised sign language with him because of his late-onset deafness, and I put my hands together and tilted my head on them: you were dreaming, my sign said and he understood me. “Dreaming? No, no, I wasn’t dreaming,” and then he went with his caregiver to get dressed. When he came out he asked me again about the kingdom and asked if it was a dream and I nodded. “Oh thank goodness,” he said. “I didn’t know how I was going to manage it. I’ve never run a kingdom and I thought I might have to order some people’s heads to come off.” Then he leaned toward me and became very conspiratorial: “But you know, if I did have to say ‘off with her head’ the first person I’d do it to would be that little girl with the big behind who comes around here to help me.” It was a fairly accurate description of one of his caregivers, who is a really good person, but his description cracked me up completely.

Most of the things he used to enjoy—reading for example—take too much of his concentration now, so when I visit, I try to think of new things he might enjoy doing. One day I took down a jigsaw puzzle from high in my old closet and put the pieces down on the kitchen table. “Let’s do this,” I said and he immediately responded, “Why?” “So we can do something together,” I answered. He nodded and we spent about fifteen minutes in silence finding the first few pieces that went together to get the puzzle started. Finally he looked up at me. “Do you think we could find something else to do together?”

We no longer have to worry that my father will keep his feelings inside. So when he writes the words “I love you” I’m grateful he lived long enough to be able to do this thing that was hard for him most of his life. In our family, we owe him so much. And he’s still trying to figure out what he can do to make us happy.

Came the Dawn: The Veep Debate

It appeared that Governor Sarah Palin and Senator Joe Biden had much more fun during their debate than did the Presidential candidates last week. Both of them smiled more genuine smiles, and both treated each other with more genuine deference. The nuances of each were fun to catch: I swear Sarah Palin said “Obama and Obiden” at one point and if you review the tape I think you’ll find it in the last half hour. And I heard Biden describing a program he disliked almost call it “ri” (for right wing?) and switched his word quickly to “re” followed by “publican.” Senator Biden was primed and ready with his decades and decades and decades and decades of service and his piles of facts and Palin was so excited to be on stage and so rarin’ to go she left all her gs behind in Alaska and almost levitated above her podium.

And she didn’t make a fool of herself, which was a relief to many of us voters and a real disappointment to the legions of commentators hauled out on television to analyze her performance. She stuck to her talking points, for which she was well prepped, and she shifted the topics to those with which she was comfortable. When she wasn’t familiar with a subject, she changed it. Senator Biden ought to know that technique: politicians on Capitol Hill have been using in for years during live interviews. “I’m glad you asked me that,” they intone, and then they answer an entirely different question altogether.

She said “also” several thousand times and she ought to cut that out (just as Senator McCain needs to eliminate his insincere-sounding “my friend” which he too has over-used). Like President George W. Bush, Palin can’t say “nu-cle-ar” and she gave General David McKiernan, our commander in Afghanistan, the name of Civil War General McClellan. But these were not career-ending fumbles.

We’ve had lots of small town guys serve as our Presidents over the years (Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton come to mind) and no one has ever subjected them to the scrutiny which Sarah Palin—who is not even running for President, by the way—has faced in the last five weeks. Now we can get on to evaluating the two men at the top of the party tickets and gosh darn it: that’s where our real attention should be. Let’s give them a shout out, shall we?

Tragedy Tomorrow: Comedy Tonight

Tonight is the big night for the two Vice Presidential candidates, and we’re all biting our nails to see how it goes. Live coverage, controversy over the moderator, discussions about what each candidate needs to accomplish. Ye gods! You’d think these two people were actually running for an important office, not the much maligned office of Vice President of the United States.

John Nance Garner was one of FDR’s veeps (another of which, Harry Truman, actually became President when FDR, inconveniently, died) and when Lyndon Johnson told him JFK had asked him to be the Vice Presidential nominee on his ticket, Garner told him, in a much repeated quote: “The Vice Presidency ain’t worth a pitcher of warm spit.” Although they say he may have used another word instead of spit.

“I never wanted to be Vice President of anything!” is a quote attributed to Nelson Rockefeller, who disdained the number two job in the nation mostly because he was rich and had gone to the right schools and pretty much figured he ought to be the guy in charge. Still, he was a heartbeat away from 1974 to 1977 when he served as the appointed Vice President to Gerald Ford who himself became President in the wake of the resignation of Richard Nixon. It was enough for Nelson. He quit politics after that.

And then there is Finley Peter Dunne, who, back in the early 20th century wrote a series of columns for the Chicago Post under the name of “Mr. Dooley,” a fictional Irishman expostulating on politics from his seat in a Chicago pub. “The Presidency is the highest office in the gift of the people,” said Mr. Dooley. “The Vice Presidency is the next highest and the lowest. It isn’t a crime exactly. You can’t be sent to jail fer it. But it’s a kind of disgrace. It’s like writing anonymous letters.”

So Sarah Palin and Joe Biden have a lot at stake tonight. The one who comes out ahead and helps his ticket win in November, will disappear into the office of the Vice President of the United States and probably never be heard from again.

Wednesday's Child: Full of Woe

America is such a great country (I always say to my friends) it survives even its leaders. After over-regulating everything in the years 1941-1981 our friends in Congress have gone about under-regulating everything in the years since. Now, thanks to a lack of oversight, we’re getting everything from lead-tainted Thomas-the Train-Engines from China to greedy capitalist con men blowing up the entire economy for the price of toxic bundled mortgage derivatives. Not to mention the fact that your local phone company won’t fix any of the lines inside your house or that credit card companies are now free to charge 100% interest rates, or that if you want to fly from Miami to San Francisco you have to go there by way of Ontario, Canada with stops in Harlingen, Texas and Reno, Nevada, and you still have to pay extra if you want to take a suitcase with you.

I covered the Hill for a long time in Washington D.C. and I never in my life saw the leadership of either party ask members to vote for a bill the outcome of which was not known in advance. That’s how it works. If the leadership wants a bill to pass and they don’t have the votes, they don’t put the bill up for a vote: they continue to tweak it until it will pass. I’m sure Democratic speaker Nancy Pelosi knew the thing was going down and put the bill up for a vote to give everyone in her party cover: anyone in her party voting for it, could blame Republicans if the bill failed and the economy tanked. Anyone in her party voting against it could say to constituents “You let me know you were overwhelmingly against this means of rescuing the U.S. economy” and that would provide them with a second kind of cover if the economy tanked. Once again, a political ploy was more important than what really happened to the country. With Louis in Casablanca I’m “Shocked! Shocked, to learn that gambling is going on here.” (Pass me my winnings.)

The sky is falling. The sky isn’t falling. Bail out Wall Street. Bail out Me. Americans are paying attention, we just don’t know who to believe anymore. The grownups keep wheeling out George “H.H.” Bush (H.H. for Herbert Hoover) having told him what to say, and he keeps warning us, and he has so little credibility left everyone treats him the way they treated Vice President Harley Hudson in Advise and Consent. “That’s great Harley,” (while not listening). “Oh yes Harley,” (while reading something else). “Fine, Harley,” (not hearing what he just said).

FDR called in a “brain trust” to help him solve America’s devastating economic problems after he was elected in 1932 (he wasn’t President in 1929 in spite of what Joe Biden thinks) and that makes sense. No President can be expected to know what to do when something this complex needs fixing. You call in specialists. And when you are the President of the United States and the problem is this important you should be able to call in the smartest specialists in the world. There has to be somebody out there smarter than Henry Paulson, formerly of Goldman Sachs, one of the fine financial institutions that got us into this mess in the first place.

If so, whose brain would you trust? It is too late for George Bush to call in anybody and the contents of his own cranium have been in doubt for several years now. But we should be studying the character of these two presidential candidates to discover, not what they say they are going to give us when they are elected, but to discern what kind of judgment they have to know when they need help and what kind of help they would seek when they saw they needed it. I haven’t seen a positive sign of this yet, but I continue to be optimistic.

I was looking forward to the Vice Presidential debate on Thursday night as a silly sort of food fight between Dumb and Dumber, but now I just want to cover my eyes. I’m not sure I’ll even be able to watch. I’m hoping they will both surprise me and be articulate and intelligent. Right now, I want everyone who has the potential to be a leader in this country to have an abundant supply of those qualities. My version of supply side economics.