Images of Inauguration Day

He was so excited: both he and the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court garbled the oath of office for the 44th president. But, it was all legal and oh-so-human. Haven't each of us had a dream like that? (Robin's update of 1/22/09: Chief Justice John Roberts re-administered the constitutionally mandated oath of office to our 44th president on 1/21/09 in the White House Map Room, just to be certain it was all legal.) His rhetoric did not soar. But he had a lot of really tough acts to follow: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan ...


Michelle Obama wore a dress and coat from Cuban-American designer Isabel Toledo. When she got out of the limo during the Inaugural Parade, the coat flapped in the cold and the new First Lady had to keep grabbing at it to pull it around her. Prediction: she'll learn what other women in the public eye have had to learn--practicality must be part of style. A coat for this event needed to close and/or needed to be weighted, a technique used by the late Princess of Wales.


Best hat at any inauguration ever. And what an inspiration to have Aretha Franklin, Queen of Soul, sing "My Country Tis of Thee." It was a real wow.



Cold, sunny, windy weather whips the American flag flying from a home down the street from my own here in Central Florida on this Inauguration Day. How lucky we all are to live in such a country. Congratulations to our 44th president, Barack Obama, and all our prayers for his success at the awesome job he faces.

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Don't Boo Hoo: America Still Strong

The Fed and the Treasury Department had another busy weekend, this time propping up Citigroup,the largest bank in the world.

The way things have been lately it might make you think the U.S. is full of a bunch of losers who can't produce anything or invent anything or save anything or even buy or sell a mortgage without going into default.

Hold your horses, as they used to say in the Old West.

America has the largest GNP in the world, three times larger than its nearest competitor, which is Japan. And that's even though the United States is the third largest nation in population (after China and India, which are each four times larger than the U.S.).

The most number of hours worked per year? U.S. workers top that list too, with Japan coming in second. The Japanese don't have the Grand Canyon and the Grand Tetons and Las Vegas so nobody there goes on vacation.

Want to make some comparisons? California has an economy as large as the nation of France (about sixth in the world). Texas has an economy as big as all of Canada. And New York State? It has an economy as large as the entire nation of Brazil, that big gun down there in Latin America.

In Detroit, where we're having a bit of a blip at present, workers on the assembly line make $75 dollars an hour. That's $150,000 a year. Might be time for folks there to take a few cuts. Yet even with some wage concessions, workers there could still most likely pay the rent. And all of them are certainly living a better life than are workers in China where the average wage is 57 cents an hour.

I hope Barak Obama, if he is truly putting together a "team of rivals" will reach really far across the aisle and bring in a few free market advocates to the Treasury Department and the Fed. They seem to have gone missing from the George W. Bush administration, but I hear they are still around, hiding out at the Hoover Institute at Stanford. They might tell the new president that it is our free market in America (the freedom to succeed, the freedom to fail and start again) that has made this country the dream of the world. And yes, we've learned it must be regulated to keep the corrupt and the greedy (whether capital or labor) from fouling the waters.

What has failed in recent days has not been our free market. It has been our government's oversight. And what with keeping all the nuts in the Middle East from blowing us up because they're jealous, and keeping all of Latin America from moving here illegally because they want a piece of the action, it is not exactly a surprise they dropped the ball.

In fact, while the government is distracted right now, maybe California ought to buy the state of Michigan. The Governator could really turn that place around, maybe with some help from Google. Come on, its better than sitting around a table and getting economic advice from France.

Not Sugar Candy: Multicultural America

These two have a lot in common.

My goodness, what a lot of fuss in the New York and Washington media about America’s first African-American President. Their surprise is what surprises me. I’m reminded of some lines Sidney Poitier says to his father in the 1967 movie “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” when he finds his father disapproves of his interracial marriage. “You see yourself as a black man,” says Poitier. “And I see myself as a man.”

Oprah Winfrey, not Katie Couric, is the most popular woman on television and one of America’s wealthiest women to boot. Katie just gets a salary. Will Smith, not Kevin Costner, is America’s hottest movie star. Think sports heroes, and Tiger Woods, Michael Jordon, and Alex Rodriguez come to mind long before Cal Ripkin, Jr. And young people are lining up to see Beyonce Knowles, not Debby Boone.

Sorry, mainstream media. America has been multicultural and colorblind for a long time. You just noticed it now? As Winston Churchill said during a visit to North America in World War II: “We have not journeyed all this way across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy.”

By the way, the restrained British barely raised an eyebrow when they elected Margaret Thatcher as their Prime Minister. A woman? I say, she certainly is, but jolly good for her.

I remember when I was a young reporter and I interviewed a developer in Portland, Oregon who had just turned a former downtown factory into one of the city’s most successful indoor shopping malls. He was Japanese-American and his parents had been interned during World War II. Now he’s a multi-millionaire. When I asked him about that he laughed and said “Yeah, my Dad would be really surprised.”

America is not perfect, but it has always been about opportunity. With each wave of immigration and each wave of change, the newcomers, the different, the “other,” have faced discrimination from the ignorant. None more so than the descendants of slavery, that stain on America’s past. But we got over it.

Now it is time for the mainstream media to do the same.

President-elect Barak Obama is an articulate young man who is taking office at an extremely difficult time in American history. I don’t care what color he is, I just hope he does a good job.

What color, by the way, do you think those people were in the Bible?

Election Week Dreaming

We have never had an election in American history the pulse of which has been taken so frequently by so many. It’s like having a one-year-long pre-race coverage for the Kentucky Derby. Every slurp of water, whinny, training trot, cool down, and every bag of oats has been covered ad nauseum . The coverage has in fact worked to reduce the meaning of the vote Election Day to the most boring horse race in history. As Jay Leno put it on Friday: “Oh great. On Sunday we set the clocks back and get one more hour of this election."

It is hard to imagine that there really was a time when Presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln felt it would undignified to campaign for himself and so relied almost entirely upon surrogates speaking for him.

Gallup has been doing a daily tracking poll. All the major networks have commissioned polls and CNN does a “poll of polls.” The bottom line is that Republican candidate John McCain has led in none of them. Thus, if the polls are accurate, and there are so many of them it would be an incredible anomaly if they were not, the election for President it all but over.

It doesn’t leave much for a conservative to cheer about. You find yourself going back over the “if only”s the way you do when a marriage has gone bad or when, for example, the Titanic went down. “If only the ship had been traveling more slowly.” “If only the men in the crow’s nest had seen the iceberg sooner.” “If only the radioman on the California hadn’t gone to bed early.”

So now the “if only”s go like this for me:

If only we hadn’t had an incumbent Republican President who spoke English as if it were a second language.

If only Jeb had run for President instead.

If only the economy hadn’t tanked thirty days before Election Day.

If only W hadn’t waited so long to fire Rummy.

If only Hillary had won the Democratic nomination—she was so unpleasant even McCain could have could beat her.

If only everybody in the media weren’t rooting for Barak Obama.

If only Dick Cheney didn’t remind so many people of Darth Vader.

If only Sarah Palin had turned out to be a little less perky and a lot more intelligent.

If only the John McCain we met in the primaries had appeared during the general election.

If only McCain had won the nomination in Y2K instead of now.

If only Carl Rove had gone missing in a flight over the North Pole.

If only someone had actually done a real investigation of ACORN.

If only the SEC had actually regulated the securities business as it was supposed to.

If only Arizona had the population of New York.

If only John McCain were part Kenyan.

But reality being what it is, conservatives will be forced to suffer through the endless recriminations of Tuesday night and Wednesday. Fortunately, I’m going to be too busy to watch all that on the Morning After. My termite guy is coming to find out if my house is about to fall in.

Experience and Leadership: What Does it Mean?

We’re about to elect one of the least experienced candidates in American history to be our leader in these troubled times. Does it matter? History tells us the answer is yes, and no.
You would have to go back to Abraham Lincoln to find a presidential candidate in the U.S. with as little experience as Barak Obama. When Lincoln was elected to serve as U.S. President in 1860 he had served four terms in the Illinois House of Representatives, and just one two-year term in the U.S. Congress. But Lincoln had also run his own businesses—first as the owner of a store (something he wasn’t very good at, by his own admission) and then as a lawyer. He had served as a captain in the Illinois state militia, a position which, at that time, meant election by the men he commanded. He was 51 years of age when he became president.


Who could have predicted that Lincoln would have been such a great leader? People who knew him, liked him and saw him as a principled man. But in the age before television and YouTube this was a very small group of people. He was a great reader and a great story teller. He was one of the first leaders in Illinois to publically speak against slavery. In 1860, many of the wheeler-dealers in his party could see the conflict with the South on the horizon and wanted no part of the presidency. Lincoln, whom they saw as bumpkin, was nominated, in part, because no one in the know really wanted the job. Nothing in his past could have foretold what a transcendent leader he was to become during the single worst period in American history. In reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book about Lincoln, Team of Rivals, I was repeatedly struck by the nuance of his political thinking, in addition to all the usual qualities we associate with Lincoln: wisdom, compassion, folksy charm, and self-sacrifice. The leadership Lincoln rose to might have been predicted by his friends; but how could voters have imagined it?

By contrast, Winston Churchill spent his entire life preparing for the most important role he was to play on the world stage: Prime Minister of Britain during World War II. He graduated from Sandhurst, Britain’s foremost military academy, in the top ten of his class. He served with distinction in India, the Sudan, and South Africa before being elected to parliament at the age of 26. In various governments over half a century he served as Home Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Secretary of State for War, Secretary of State for Air, Minister of Munitions, and Lord of the Admiralty. He also served as an officer in the trenches of the Western Front in World War I. He wrote dozens of books, served as a war correspondent, was captured by the Boers in South Africa, escaped, and traveled 300 miles to freedom. “I’m Winston bloody Churchill, and I’m free!” he famously shouted on as he crossed into Portuguese-African territory. He was the grandson of the Duke of Marlborough and though his skeptical grandmother called him “that upstart, Winston Churchill,” his leadership skills were not a surprise to anyone.

Ronald Reagan’s experience is the subject of much discussion. The fact that he spent the early part of his life as a movie actor caused a great deal of laughter among the inside-the-beltway crowd in Washington. But what he had done in Hollywood was to rise to the top of a profession to which millions aspire and only a rare few achieve. He served as president of the Screen-Actors-Guild, one of the largest unions in the world. He served in the military during World War II. And, he had executive experience: he served two terms as governor of California, a state so large and so fertile it has the fifth largest GNP in the world. It is true his only foreign policy experience came from his knowledge of California’s role as a world class exporter of goods and services. But, as we learned when his handwritten speeches were published after his death, he had been a student of foreign affairs all his adult life.

Reagan, like all great leaders, was a creative thinker. When offered two bad choices in the war games of his day—concede to Soviet aggression or commit to the philosophy of “mutually assured destruction” (known as MAD) in a nuclear war—Reagan imagined a third solution, a missile shield that could protect the U.S. from just such a holocaust. Once again, the non-creative thinkers in Washington derided his idea and called it “Star Wars.” Missiles that intercept missiles are in use today, most famously in Israel, where the American technology is much applauded.

At 47, Barak Obama is the youngest and least experienced of all of the leaders I’ve sited here. He has served three terms in the Illinois senate and part of a term in the U.S. Senate. He has never run his own business nor served in the military. We have no idea what kind of a leader he will be. He might be a bad leader. He might be a good one. We know next to nothing about his leadership abilities. Yet this is not so terribly unusual. There is no real experience that can prepare a person to become President of the United States. Since it appears he is going to get elected we can only hope and pray he’ll be good at his job. The peace and safety of the world depends upon it.

John McCain, Fighter Pilot, Finally Showed up for Presidential Debate Number Three

And He Brought Joe the Plumber With Him!

With a relaxed smile and a strong voice, Republican candidate for U.S. President, John McCain finally took on Democratic candidate Barak Obama and for the first time put the young, inexperienced Obama on the defensive. McCain landed his fighter jet right on the carrier. He seemed to surprise Obama with his strength and intelligence. The John McCain who toughed out five years in the Hanoi Hilton made a comeback at this debate. He told Barak Obama to his face that he was wrong about "spreading the wealth" and should let Joe the Plumber instead keep his own wealth. That he was wrong about Bill Ayres (whom McCain forgot to mention was bombing buildings in America while McCain sat in a prison cell, being tortued in Hanoi) and wrong for not standing up to the corruption in his own party.

Joe the Plumber was the unseen third party at the debate. He is Joe Wurzelbacher, an Ohio man who earlier in the week confronted Barak Obama at a rally and told him that under the Obama tax plan, he, Joe, would be considered "rich" and thus subject to higher taxes under Obama if he bought the plumbing business he's been working for all his life. Barak Obama revealed his true political philosphy in his ad-libbed reponse that he believed it was time to "spread the wealth around." Whose wealth would that be? My Dad's, who saved and scrimped all his life? We should now give his money to Barak Obama for reapportionment to those who bought SUVs and flat screen TVs and are now in debt? This one statement should make Americans do some serious re-thinking of Barak Obama.

But will it? I told my friend Leslie that in spite of McCain's strong showing in the final debate he has two big things going against him that have nothing to do with his potential to be president. The first is that voters are so disgusted with what is happening to the economy that they are inclined to vote out the party in power, and that means Republicans, since Republicans have held the White House for the last eight years. And in spite of the fact that John McCain finally told Barak Obama he is not George Bush ("If you wanted to run against George Bush you should have run four years ago," he said last night), the sad truth is that John McCain is likely to be the baby voters throw out with the bathwater, as they toss the Bush administration out the back door and into the snow.

McCain's second disadvantage is that he is an old, broken, white-haired, puffy-faced white guy who doesn't photograph well as he sits stiffly next to his long, lanky, cool and youthful opponent. Obama is telegenic and this gives his style-over-substance campaign the boost it needs to overcome an idea as obtuse to most Americans as an understanding of his "spread the wealth" philosophy. One opportunity John McCain has missed, I believe, is to tell his audience that he earned his broken body honorably, being tortured for his country. I gather, however, that John McCain is the kind of tough guy who doesn't believe you talk about things like that, nor use them to advance yourself. It is honorable of him, but I think it might give young people a better understanding of why his shoulders and arms seem so immobile and his neck seems too stiff to turn.

During the debate McCain also gave a warm and thoughtful defense of his running mate, Sarah Palin. A lot of us were glad to hear it. As a Governor of a frontier state, she has been subjected to treatment no previous governors who've run for high office --think Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton--have been subjected to in recent memory. The eastern half of the United States and its media are really befuddled by the West. They ought to go there sometime. Some western states even have libraries.

I think, in this debate, for the first time, John McCain made Barak Obama's eloquence look more like the slickness it is. Barak Obama is, after all, a man who has had even less experience in government than has the much maligned Sarah Palin. Still, it might be too late for McCain's strong performance and for the questions he raised about Barak Obama's words.

I sure wish this John McCain had showed up before now.

OMG: Yet Another Debate

Can you stand to dispose of another ninety minutes of your life watching these two guys make promises to us they can't keep? All the pundits on television are telling us the election is over and Obama has won. Don't know if they are right, but based on what has been going on with our economy, both of the parties have a lot of explaining to do. And, since our choice is to vote for either a Republican or a Democrat it doesn't appear to me we have much of a choice. How about Bill Gates for President? Or Warren Buffett? No that probably wouldn't work either. We'd all be required to buy Windows latest program and bank at whatever institution Warren Buffett happened to have bought that day.

In truth, what I would like to see during the debate is the John McCain who ran in the primaries. Real. Intelligent. Thoughtful. Moderate. And a verifiable maverick who did fight corruption in Congress. He seems to have disappeared behind the advice of someone who is putting a finger in the wind each day before McCain speaks. Anyway: regardless of what I said in paragraph one, I am rooting for the real McCain to appear. Let's have a Westerner as President again with a Veep from the really new frontier. They can't do any worse than the present establishment. That is hard to imagine.

Check here tomorrow night. We'll be blogging the debate and I'll be interviewing my average American voter, "Christine," about her views on the winner and loser in the final debate of camapaign 2008.

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The Economic Crisis Deepens: It Makes Me Think of Guys and Dolls and Broadcast News and Thomas Jefferson

The grownups wheeled George W. Bush out again this morning in another attempt to calm the markets, which ignored him as usual and went right on tanking. In fact, since Congress passed the economic “rescue” bill, proposed by the White House, the Dow Jones Industrial average has dropped more than a thousand points. Apparently I’m not the only person in whom our chief executive does not inspire confidence.


What awful luck that America should be going through this at the same time we are having a presidential election. In Britain, where an election for Prime Minister takes no more than a month, the country can turn quickly from a bad leader to an excellent one with very little fuss. When World War II began, the appeaser Neville Chamberlain was Prime Minister. Eight months later without missing a step, Chamberlain resigned and the great Winston Churchill stepped in to lead the nation.

Our system is such that we can’t go back and re-examine the candidates we’ve rejected over the past primary season to find someone who might be a better fit for the crisis at hand. What we’re left with are two people who have zero economic leadership credentials and who both seem to believe that the insertion of government into the market is the best way to keep Americans from financial panic. Where will all this money come from for bailouts and FDIC insurance and mortgage rescues?

John McCain is beginning to remind me of Nathan Detroit in the musical Guys and Dolls, always promising marriage to his “fiancé” poor Adelaide and never following through. I don’t know if McCain really does intend to help out individual homeowners by inserting the government between the homeowner in default and his bank, but to me, that seems implausible. So, like Adelaide, in Guys and Dolls, I sing:

You promise me this, you promise me that
You promise me anything under the sun
Then you give me a kiss,
And you're grabbing your hat
And you're off to the races again
When I think of the time gone by
When I think of the way I cry
I could honestly die.”
(”Sue Me” from Guys and Dolls, 1955, music and lyrics by Frank Loesser)

Our other candidate,Obama, is a cipher to me. So smooth, so slick, and no completely unknowable. The only thing we do know about him is that he picks some really creepy friends, from his minister who thought America should be hit again harder after September 11, 2001, to Bill Ayers, his pal who was a fugitive from the feds for bombing the pentagon and the capitol and who said in the book he wrote after he surrendered, “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” You can tell a lot from the friends a man chooses.

Our choice then, on one hand, is John “Nathan Detroit” McCain and on the other is a guy who reminds me of the speech Albert Brooks’ gives in the movie Broadcast News. In it he is speaking about a shallow anchorman who has stolen his girl, but it could be about anybody who looks good on the outside and who is something else underneath:

“What do you think the Devil is going to look like if he’s around? Nobody is going to be taken in if he has a long, red, pointy tail. No. I’m semi-serious here. He will look attractive and he will be nice and helpful and he will get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation and he will never do an evil thing . . . he will just bit by little bit lower standards where they are important. Just coax along flash over substance . . . Just a tiny bit. And he will talk about all of us really being salesmen. . . . And he’ll get all the great women.” (From the film Broadcast News)

I’m disillusioned by this campaign with all its pandering and promises and by its angry tone and lack of real passion for the spirit of America. I’m concerned because it is just at times like this that a country can turn to a really dangerous leader, one who speaks one agenda but holds secretly to another. We have to worry about that, because we are in troubled times. I mean things must be tough. The Mass Mutual Financial Group is using Donavan's "Try and Catch the Wind" in a recent advertisement. My sentiments exactly.

This economic crisis has shed light on the fact that our congress is bogged down in corruption and has betrayed those of us who entrusted our beloved country to its care. Our president, too, has let us down by his negligence and his arrogance, and apparent lack of an iota of common sense. I dislike being a pessimist because I believe the best leaders are optimists with brains like, FDR, Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan, all of whom had uplifting visions of their nations and led the people to raise their own view of what was possible. Still it is a tough time for us right now. So today, just for today, I can agree with Thomas Jefferson when he said so long ago: "I weep for my country when I reflect that God is just.”

No Country for Grumpy Old Men: My Blog on the First Presidential Debate

I believe that in this campaign Senator John McCain has the best credentials to be President of the United States, but during the first presidential debate last night in Oxford, Mississippi, he looked like a grumpy old man who could only rarely frame a thought into a complete sentence. Senator Barak Obama, whom I don’t support, came across, by contrast, as a thoughtful, intelligent person who looks at America as an ideal and wants to make that ideal better. I think that’s how Americans will view this debate: not as a boxing match, with each candidate scoring points, blow by blow and round by round, but as whole in which one candidate seemed articulate and smooth and the other looked old, tired, and, to put it as nicely as I can, a little bit like your doddering old grandpa who is always haranguing you on his favorite subjects.

The old part? Well, McCain can’t do anything about that one. His white hair and aging, aching body make him look like the senior citizen he is. The doddering part? You could see it right out of the shoot when Senator McCain had the opportunity to explain why he dropped everything and went to Washington on Thursday, and what he would like to see in a bill designed to rescue our beleaguered economy. Not a word on those subjects. What we got instead was this crotchety old guy who kept dwelling on “earmarks:” something no one in his right mind would publicly favor. Alright already, grandpa, let’s move on from this subject (picture the kids here poking each other in the ribs and rolling their eyes.)

On foreign policy, McCain was sharper and more knowledgeable than he was on the economy. But then there was that crack about Putin: “I looked into his eyes and I saw three letters. K. G. B.” I think this was supposed to be a joke, but McCain said it with an expression on his face that made him look like a mad scientist. Eeek! He’s losing it! (I said to myself.) Timing is everything with humor and McCain’s timing wasn’t there. Even his perceptive comment about Obama’s liberalism—“It’s hard to reach across the aisle from that far to the left”— was not said with an ounce of good humor toward his opponent.

Obama looked the man he was: taller, thinner, younger, smoother, an ivy leaguer who is more like 21st century America than is McCain and who wears his multiculturalism like an Armani suit. I know his record shows he’s a liberal. But at this first debate he spoke about his country and its voters with great affection and talked about how he might help them. I didn’t hear McCain match this emotion once—okay, that one time when he spoke about veterans. But there are others of us out here too.

McCain harped on “the surge” in Iraq far too much, and kept calling on the name of General David Petraeus as if he had god-like qualities. Obama, on the other hand, spent far too much time crying over the spilt milk of the Iraq war. On that subject, McCain made his best point saying that the next president won’t be dealing with whether we should or should not be there but instead, “How we leave, when we leave, and what we leave behind.”

In this debate the advantage went to Barak Obama. McCain will need to relax, be more gracious, finish more of his sentences, and lighten up a bit if he’s going to do well in the next one.

But the next debate on the docket is the Vice Presidential debate and that one should be a hoot and a half. Joe Biden with his hair plugs and his Aunt Blabby mouth is always entertaining and at the other podium we have this peppy little unknown quantity from the Great White North, Governor Sarah Palin. She’s a terrific speaker when she’s scripted and she’ll be facing the original loose cannon. Can she ad lib with the best of them? I can’t wait to see what happens.

Candidate John McCain Makes Another Surprise Move: Will the Debate Go Forward on Friday?

I wonder if Barak Obama will wake up one morning and wish he had attended Annapolis or one of the other service academies. John McCain may have graduated near the bottom of his class, but it appears he absorbed quite a bit of intelligent strategy between accumulating his demerits at the Naval Academy ...

When John McCain chose Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his vice presidential candidate he took everyone by surprise. His action created a new political star and caused a dramatic change in the discussion surrounding which team would best govern this country. It was exactly what McCain intended. He was running against an opponent who represented a "first." McCain's unorthodox choice produced another first and made Obama's vice presidential choice look dull and predictable.

Now, as McCain suspends his campaign and returns to Washington to get back to his first job as a U.S. Senator and be part of the negotiations on the big congressional economic bailout bill, he appears to once again have taken his less experienced opponent by surprise. A startled Obama said this afternoon at his press conference that he planned to attend the debate. At 5:10 EST the Presidential Debate Commission said the debate would go ahead as scheduled. So what will happen? Will Obama show up and face a McCain surrogate? How about Barak Obama facing Sarah Palin? Now there’s an idea that has to have come from the mind of one of the Naval Academies smartest and most notorious pranksters!