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A Price Tag on Patriotism

May 19, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Photo courtesy of Ken Teegardin, www.seniorliving.org

Will Rogers was wrong. The legendary humorist, speaking of the responsibilities each of us has as a citizen of this nation, once observed, “America is a great country, but you can’t live in it for nothing.” Unless, it turns out, you’re Eduardo Saverin, the 30-year-old co-founder of Facebook, who just before that company launched its initial public offering, which would make him a multibillionaire, renounced his American citizenship and moved to Singapore.

To be fair, according to Tom Goodman, Saverin’s New York-based spokesperson, “Eduardo recently found it to be more practical to become a resident of Singapore since he plans to live there for an indefinite period of time.” That is, take your choice, bull, baloney or bunkum.

Today’s capital gains tax rate in the United States — which is one-half of what it was when conservative Icon Ronald Reagan was president — is just 15 percent. But compared to Singapore’s zero capital gains tax rate, it must look irresistible to those who put profits over patriotism.

Some conservatives who seem to hate taxes more than they love America even praise expatriate Saverin for renouncing his U.S. citizenship. Forbes’ John Tamny, who covers “the intersection of economics and politics,” writes that “wise minds could very credibly proclaim him (Saverin) an American hero for doing what he did.”

Let us review the story up to now. Fleeing kidnapping threats against his wealthy family, Eduardo Saverin, at the age of 13, came to the United States from Brazil, his country of birth. He became a U.S. citizen and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, where he met the two other co-founders of Facebook.

Among the rights the United States provided to her adopted son Eduardo Saverin was security from personal danger, the freedom to become whatever his talents and hard work would permit him to be, copyright and patent laws to protect his invention and a court system to guarantee those protections.

You can call Saverin a genius, an extraordinary entrepreneur and a capitalist success. What you cannot call Saverin is a patriot. Ungrateful to the country that gave him safe harbor and a new life, Saverin put a price tag on patriotism and, rather than pay the taxes dues on his unfathomable fortune, chose to get himself a change-of-address card for Singapore.

This is the thanks he gives to the people and their government that welcomed him and guaranteed that the air he would breathe and the water he would drink were clean, that the food he ate and medicine he took were healthful, and that he and his family were protected by the world’s best military.

It is beyond kind to call someone who greedily grabs all that his new U.S. citizenship gives him and then refuses to give back what he owes a freeloader. No, this loathsome behavior is instead parasitic.

Fifty years ago, a young American president told the world that “to assure the survival and the success of liberty,” he and his fellow countrymen “will pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship.” Today, for Eduardo Saverin and his apologists in the tax-avoidance club, to be a citizen is all about your rights and nothing about your responsibilities. And if you don’t like any law, you can just do what to the rest of us is truly unimaginable — and renounce your American citizenship.

To find out more about Mark Shields and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

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Shortcuts for the 2012 Campaign

May 12, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Shortcuts for the 2012 Campaign

Photo courtesy of Andrew Blasko

Please accept the following as a small token of appreciation from your semi-faithful correspondent, who knows how busy life can get, what with graduations, Memorial Day and everything. We read all the campaign press releases and candidate statements so that you won’t have to.

I will happily put the bumper sticker on my car of any presidential candidate who says, with a modicum of humility: “This is probably the second or third most important election of this century.” I just stop listening after any politician tells voters (because his name is on the ballot) that “this is the most important election of your lifetime.”

President Obama’s campaign staff is having trouble coming up with a slogan for 2012. They have tried, and apparently rejected, “Winning the Future” and “An America Built to Last,” and are now trying simply “Forward.”

A good slogan can in fact define a campaign. In 1884, Gen. Edward S. Bragg seconded Grover Cleveland‘s nomination and championed Cleveland’s candidacy with the simple statement, “We love him most for the enemies he has made!”

Hugh Carey, though outspent, won the New York governorship in 1974 against a deep-pocketed but inexperienced opponent with the catchphrase, “This year, before they tell you what they’re going to do, make them show you what they’ve done.”

In 1952, with Americans fighting in a stalemated Asian land war, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower‘s pledge, “I’ll go to Korea,” carried the day.

Richard Nixon’s political comeback was secured in 1968 at least in part because of his campaign slogan, “This time, vote like your whole world depended upon it.”

I will be surprised if this October President Obama’s crowds of supporters or TV commercials will be chanting “Forward.”

It would have been a really tough job to be either a campaign strategist or a speechwriter for President George Washington. Why, you ask? Because Gen. Washington is the only presidential candidate in history to run an entire campaign without blaming every problem — from the latest outbreak of ringworm to an epidemic of double-parking — on the administration of his predecessor.

I refuse to consider voting for any congressional candidate who either wears tasseled loafers or campaigns by endlessly telling everyone who will listen just how much he loathes Washington, D.C., Capitol Hill and a majority of the congressional colleagues with whom he would serve.

My reasoning is simple: I wouldn’t hire someone to baby-sit — even if she or he had a graduate degree in juvenile psychology and was Phi Beta Kappa, clean-living, disciplined and well-mannered — if that baby-sitting applicant candidly confided how much she or he personally disliked children.

How good a member of Congress could anyone be who blindly hates Congress and everybody in it? Answer: not very.

Our two major parties are captives of historical caricatures or stereotypes. Because Democrats were the party of immigrants, the lower class and those at the social margins, that party took pride in nominating presidential candidates who had graduated from Ivy League schools, knew which salad fork to use and who could speak in complete sentences. Examples include Franklin Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson, John Kennedy, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Republicans were seen as the party of the well-to-do, the socially acceptable and the native-born. To overcome that perception, the GOP preferred nominees who were not to the manor born but who came from humble origins. Abraham Lincoln, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford and Bob Dole rebutted the image of Republicans as the well-born and privileged.

Which brings us to the case of Mitt Romney, who was not born in a log cabin and whose mother did not work the late shift to keep him in shoes. With his tin ear (“I’m unemployed, too”; My wife “Ann droves a couple of Cadillacs”), he risks reinforcing the negative stereotype of Republicans as the party of the out-of-touch rich.

The challenge will be for Mitt to demonstrate an authentic connection with ordinary Americans.

To find out more about Mark Shields and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

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General Electric and the Death of American Outrage

April 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Photo courtesy of David Neubert

If there was a funeral notice, I missed it. No obituary appeared in any of my daily papers. But make no mistake about it: In the spring of 2011 in the United States of America, our collective sense of moral outrage must now be officially dead.

You want proof? On March 25, The New York Times ran David Kocieniewski’s front-page story disclosing that General Electric — which had corporate profits of $14.2 billion last year, including $5.1 billion in this country — did not pay one dime of federal taxes to the U.S. Treasury. That is the same GE the CEO of which, Jeffrey Immelt, was chosen personally by President Obama to head the president’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.

Where did the outrage go? Every one of us can know for sure that every firefighter, every special education teacher, every hospice nurse we run into, each of them will individually on April 15 pay more in federal taxes than will General Electric. And more as well than ExxonMobil, Citigroup and Bank of America paid Uncle Sam last year.

There was a time, barely a quarter-century ago, when news like that did engage an American president and lead to a rewriting and reform of the nation’s loophole-heavy tax law. When then-Treasury Secretary Donald Regan told President Ronald Reagan that 60 American corporations would pay less that year in federal taxes than the president’s personal secretary, Kathleen Osbourne, would, Reagan, according to Regan, responded, “I just didn’t realize that things had gotten that far out of line.”

More importantly, the Gipper, after being re-elected in a landslide, threw his political support squarely behind the tax-reform effort, initiated by Democratic Sen. Bill Bradley, which would eventually triumph in law as the Tax Reform Act of 1986.

Shepherded expertly through Congress by Democratic House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski and Republican Senate Finance Committee Chairman Bob Packwood, the reform law was inspired by the straightforward principles that people of equal incomes should pay equal taxes and that the tax code should elevate simplicity and, as to the degree possible, eliminate complexity.

In the last 25 years, presidents and Congresses have compromised — make that sold out — those principles, and we end up with the current statutory snarl and its corporate welfare, when the corporate share of all U.S. taxes paid has dropped from 30 percent of the total in the mid-1950s to just 6.6 percent in 2009.

While all of this takes place, the newly empowered House Republican majority makes it clear that their new lean, federal budget will include cuts of $1.3 billion from community health centers across that nation, which could mean denying access to medical care for 11 million people. Add to those, cuts to Head Start of $1.1 billion, which would translate into dropping 200,000 children from the proven preschool program.

I forgot to mention that GE, according to the Times piece, also claimed it was owed a tax benefit from the Treasury of $3.2 billion on its 2010 taxes.

All of this brings to mind the sworn testimony in a New York courtroom of Elizabeth Baum. Baum, a housekeeper, quoted her multimillionaire employer, on trial for income-tax evasion, as telling her: “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.” After that, Leona Helmsley became an enduring object of public scorn. Of course, that was when outrage was still alive in this land.

 

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A Week Is a Lifetime in Politics

March 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Back when men still wore hats and ladies wore gloves, my precinct committeewoman made me memorize an iron rule of American politics: A week is a lifetime politically, and three months is an eternity.

That wise maxim has apparently been forgotten by the would-be 2012 Republican challengers to President Barack Obama, not a single one of whom — with quite possibly only 40 weeks remaining before the first, real main event of the 2012 presidential nominating fight, the crucial Iowa caucuses — has yet to declare her or his White House candidacy.

Because our presidential elections are held on November in years divisible by four and because organizing separate presidential organizations simultaneously in several dozen states requires people, money and, most of all, time, a candidate must generally decide to run no later than late winter of the year before the election. That would be now.

The problem is that the decision to challenge or not to challenge an incumbent president is almost always overly influenced by the challenger’s judgment of the incumbent president’s political strength a year and a half before the actual general election voting.

Consider the late winter of 1983, when President Ronald Reagan‘s re-election prospects for November 1984 were, to put it bluntly, bleak. When asked by the Gallup Poll, “Do you approve or disapprove of the way Ronald Reagan is handling his job as president,” only 35 percent of the Gipper’s constituents gave him a positive grade.

So what happened? Democrats rushed into the race — including Walter Mondale, John Glenn, Gary Hart, Alan Cranston, George McGovern and Jesse Jackson — sure that Reagan was beatable. But if a week is a lifetime politically, then a year and a half is a millennium. By November 1984, Reagan was getting favorable grades from 60 percent in the Gallup Poll and, more importantly, was carrying 49 of the 50 states while wining a landslide re-election.

In 1988, Reagan’s vice president, George H.W. Bush won his own White House race, and as he prepared in 1991 to run for re-election, he looked unbeatable. After Saddam Hussein had invaded and occupied Kuwait, President Bush 41 and his secretary of state, Jim Baker organized a 32-country coalition to drive Saddam from Kuwait, won support for that action from both a Democratic Congress and from the United Nations and then, in a remarkable four-day military offensive, won the first clear-cut American military victory since 1945.

President Bush in the winter of 1991 — a year and a half before his re-election day — stood at an unprecedented 89 percent favorable in the Gallup Poll. One by one, leading Democrats — Dick Gephardt, Al Gore, Lloyd Bentsen, Bill Bradley, Mario Cuomo — who had openly or secretly lusted after the presidency saw Bush as unbeatable and came to the same decision: some variation of, “Rather than run, I choose to spend more time with my family.”

Only five Democrats rolled the dice that year —Tom Harkin, Bob Kerrey, Jerry Brown, the late Paul Tsongas and Bill Clinton. By Labor Day of 1992, President Bush’s favorable number in the Gallup had plummeted to 29 percent, and he would lose that November to Bill Clinton. A week is a lifetime.

As of today, President Obama looks formidable: a 50 percent favorable rating according to Gallup, no apparent primary challenge and, quite possibly, the nation’s first billion dollar campaign treasury. But Republicans should remember 1984 and 1992 before concluding that the race against Obama is impossible. If gasoline goes to six bucks a gallon — not impossible — no incumbent will be safe in 2012. Because a week truly can be a lifetime in politics.

 

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The “Yankee Doodle Dandy” Defense

March 13, 2011 By 1 Comment

Photo courtesy of Gage Skidmore

When their actions or words violate the established norms of acceptable behavior, too many CEOs and politicians reflexively turn to the Non-Apology-Apology.

Implying that people who are upset by what he said or did are somehow overly sensitive, the offending party unapologetically offers, “If I in any way offended anyone, then I would want to apologize …”

A tiresome evasion is the use of the passive case to distance the non-apologizer from any moral responsibility: “Mistakes were made.” How refreshing it would be to hear from a public figure: “What I did was wrong and indefensible. I am sorry. I apologize and ask for your forgiveness.”

But when it comes to creative excuse-making, nobody comes even close to the former speaker of the House and likely 2012 Republican presidential candidate, Newt Gingrich, who wrapped himself in Old Glory this week while explaining his past marital infidelity to the Christian Broadcasting Network: “There’s no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate.”

Picture the scene. Newt patriotically working around-the-clock, and then some damn temptress strolls by humming, “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” and the next thing you know, just because of how passionately he feels for the old U.S.A., they’re canoodling and worse.

His “patriotism made me do it” defense is as nervy as it is imaginative, although it might have been more believable if he had been caught cheating with Betsy Ross and/or the Daughters of the American Revolution.

If this Newt-onian logic had prevailed in 1776, Nathan Hale might have stated, “I only regret that I have but one wife to lose for my country.”

We really should be a little sympathetic to the former speaker, for whom his surges of patriotism were apparently an irresistible aphrodisiac.

Consider what moral theologians call “the occasions of sin” that relentlessly tempted Mr. Gingrich: every Fourth of July, any band playing a John Philip Sousa march, Philadelphia and the Liberty Bell, New York and the Statue of Liberty, the glimpse of a high-flying American bald eagle, the U.S. Capitol — where he worked — as well as the Washington Monument.

Gingrich, a recent convert from the Baptist faith to Catholicism, tells us that he is now a changed man, happily devoted to his third wife, Calista. I knew Gingrich when he was a Baptist, and he was not an unqualified admirer of the Church of Rome. Twenty-five years ago, this is what he had to say publicly about the then-retiring House speaker, Democrat Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill:

“O’Neill was a very passionate local politician representing the Irish Catholic Boston system that (James Michael) Curley had made famous, and in many ways he never evolved much beyond that,” said Gingrich. “He was a pretty effective legislative leader, with an occasional instinct for national activity, but one who always started from what he knew and learned in the saloons and streets of Boston.”

Curley, born in 1874, was the brilliant but corrupt four-term Boston mayor who served a jail term. Tip O’Neill was neither a Curley partisan nor an acolyte.

Newt Gingrich often brings to mind the unflattering line about the British politician Peter Mandelson — that, for him, “the truth was like a second home — he didn’t live there all the time.”

Given Gingrich’s unabashed nationalism and his propensity for hard work, and the problems that combination has allegedly produced in the past, his winning the presidency — a backbreaking job — just might by his own frank admission put at risk his recently cherished fidelity.

 

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Open Mike 2011

March 5, 2011 By 1 Comment

After more or less faithful attendance at 19 national party nominating conventions and after having worked in or covered the last 11 presidential campaigns, I have concluded that, try as you might, it is all but impossible not to personally like some candidates much more than you like others.

It’s an occupational risk. But whom you like more almost always has a lot less to do with the candidate’s positions or policies than with his sense of proportion and, especially, his sense of humor. In more than 45 years, I have never known a presidential candidate whom I liked more or enjoyed more than the 1976 runner-up to Jimmy Carter, the late Arizona Democrat “Mo” Udall.

A confession: I like former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, the conservative runner-up to John McCain for the 2008 GOP nomination. Like Udall, Huckabee is witty and unpretentious, two qualities missing from the driven, self-absorbed individuals who see in their mirrors the fifth profile needed to complete Mount Rushmore.

As a self-identified “conservative who isn’t mad at anybody,” Huckabee could kid openly about his home state’s political corruption by stating “the five words most feared” by an Arkansas politician: “Would the defendant please rise?”

But I liked his political candor, too. At a Republican presidential debate in November 2007, when former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, reflecting the anti-immigrant fever of most GOP candidates, attacked the Arkansas state program that enabled the children of undocumented immigrants to apply for college scholarships, Huckabee stuffed him: “I’m standing here tonight on this stage because I got an education. If I hadn’t had the education, I wouldn’t be standing on this stage. I might be picking lettuce … . In all due respect, we’re a better country than to punish children for what their parents did. ”

Just last week, at an afternoon coffee with reporters hosted by the Christian Science Monitor, I heard Huckabee break with Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin and other conservatives who have bashed Michelle Obama’s healthy-eating-anti-obesity campaign: “She (Mrs. Obama) has been criticized unfairly by a lot of my fellow conservatives. It is out of a reflex rather than out of a thoughtful expression. We don’t have to believe that everything the other side proposes is immediately and altogether bad. ”

So you can imagine my surprise — make that shock — when I heard that Huckabee, while promoting his latest book, “A Simple Government,” on conservative Steve Malzberg’s radio show last Monday, said of Barack Obama: “And one thing I do know is his having grown up in Kenya, his view of the Brits for example (is) very different than the average American.” Huckabee’s spokesman said the governor “simply misspoke,” that he had “meant to say the president grew up in Indonesia. ”

That, too, is wrong. Other than spending four years of his early life in Indonesia, Barack Obama grew up in Hawaii. He never lived in Kenya and did not visit that country until he was in is 20s. His “view of the Brits” was certainly not influenced by a Kenyan father who abandoned him when he was an infant and whom Obama met but once when he was 10 years old.

I refuse to believe that Mike Huckabee was playing any sort of race card politically in that radio interview. But I am mystified by a) how wrong he was on his facts about the life of the man whom he might run against in 2012 or b) how grossly careless Huckabee was with his facts.

Not the level of performance you would expect from such a likeable, sure-footed, top-tier presidential candidate. Explanations would be both welcome and appreciated. It all may simply mean that Mike Huckabee, the front-runner in 2011, is just not going to run in 2012.

 

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The New, Improved Mitt Romney

February 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Mitt Romney, the once and almost certainly future Republican presidential candidate, has great teeth and hair and near-perfect features. He hasn’t gained five pounds in the last 40 years, and I bet, as an adolescent, he never had pimples. To this day, his suits and shirts miraculously never seem to wrinkle.

He looks like the award-winning anchor of your major market “Eyewitness News.” All of the above are superficial but, sadly, real reasons why aging, overweight, unhandsome political reporters might have been expected to give Romney a frosty reception.

Aware of this, Romney in his last presidential campaign, when he met with a small group of national political journalists, would first recall a conversation he supposedly had over breakfast with his equally attractive wife, Ann. He would recount how he had told Ann that he was going to be meeting that day with these “influential, nationally known journalists,” adding, “Tell me, Ann, did you ever imagine even in your wildest dreams that I’d be meeting with such a room full of presidential kingmakers?” To which Mrs. Romney snappily replied, “Mitt, you’re not in my wildest dreams!” With one self-deprecating fable, Romney simultaneously flattered his listeners and showed he could laugh at himself. Not bad.

What is not so good, though, is Romney’s continued, clumsy attempts to rewrite his own political record. The latest example was spotted by David Bernstein in the Boston Phoenix, who noted the deviations between the just-issued paperback version of Romney’s book “No Apology” and the original, published not quite a year ago. In 2010, Romney had written the administration’s economic stimulus “will accelerate the timing of the start of the recovery.” In the paperback, Romney rewrites, “The ‘all-Democrat’ stimulus passed in early 2009 has been a failure.”

What this little discrepancy reminds us of is Romney’s 1994 Massachusetts campaign for the U.S. Senate against the late Ted Kennedy, in which Romney told the Log Cabin Republicans that he would be better than Kennedy in making “equality for gays and lesbians a mainstream concern.” He called President Clinton‘s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy “the first of a number of steps that will ultimately lead to gays and lesbians being able to serve openly and honestly in our nation’s military.”

By the time he was courting Republican presidential primary voters, Romney had backed off his support and favored leaving the matter entirely in the military’s hands.

On abortion, the earlier Romney had stated emphatically: “I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country. … I believe that Roe v. Wade has been the law for 20 years and we should sustain and support it. I sustain and support that law and the right of a woman to make that choice.” He won the Massachusetts governorship eight years later pledging to “preserve and protect a woman’s right to choose.” By 2007, Romney declared that he was firmly pro-life.

In late 2005, Romney said the John McCain-Ted Kennedy immigration reform bill “reasonable” — before the 2008 campaign, when he condemned it as an “amnesty plan.”

After signing Massachusetts’ landmark health care legislation guaranteeing virtually universal coverage, Romney told The New York Times that the law — with its individual mandate to buy insurance similar to that in the federal law which Republicans are now challenging in Congress and the courts — was “95 percent of what I proposed” and “a big part of the legacy I will have personally for my four years’ service as governor.”

Critics have called him a flip-flopper, and one of his 2008 Republican rivals, while acknowledging that all politicians change over time, bluntly told me, “Mitt Romney has more positions than the Kama Sutra.”

Mitt Romney is smart, handsome, accomplished, rich, personable and articulate. That’s what he is. What we don’t yet know is who he is.

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The Road to Re-election Does Not Go Through Cairo

February 12, 2011 By 1 Comment

Anastasio Somoza was the corrupt and brutal dictator of Nicaragua from the U.S. presidency of Franklin Roosevelt well into Dwight Eisenhower‘s White house tenure. When an opponent with real evidence directly accused him of having stolen an election, Somoza retorted, “Indeed, you won the election, but I won the count.”

Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian “strongman” (you call a despot a dictator when he mostly opposes your national self-interest and a strongman when he has mostly served your national self-interest) is just one of many anti-democratic oppressors the United States has been close to over the years.

Yes, the stakes in Egypt are enormously high — primarily for the people of Egypt but also for the future of the Middle East, with consequences for much of the world beyond, including the United States. If the eventual outcome is a happy one, with a free, stable and prospering Egypt constructively engaged with its neighbors, it’s possible that the U.S. and President Obama will receive at least some credit for having positively contributed to that result.

But if the Obama team is planning to emphasize the incumbent president’s foreign policy strengths in the 2012 campaign, they can save money, time and effort by forgetting about it.

When the economy is bad, the economy is only the issue in American presidential politics. Foreign policy successes do not by themselves re-elect presidents faced with immediate problems on the domestic front.

Look at Harry Truman, whose Truman Doctrine providing military aid to Turkey and Greece and saved both of those countries from falling under Soviet control, who rebuilt a war-devastated Western Europe through the plan named for his Secretary of State, Gen. George C. Marshall, who crafted NATO and the European defense system and, through a bold airlift, saved Berlin. With sagging poll numbers, economic strife and a revolt in his own Democratic Party, Truman did not even run for re-election in 1952.

Or what about George H.W. Bush? After Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990, President Bush, with his Secretary of State Jim Baker, assembled a genuine international coalition of 32 nations, and won endorsement for actions from the United Nations and from a Democratic-controlled Congress. In an impressive four-day military blitz in late February 1991, the U.S. and coalition forces drove the Iraqi troops out of Kuwait and crippled Iraq’s military capacity.

During this President Bush’s first and only term, the Berlin wall came down, after 45 years Germany was reunited, democracy peacefully bloomed in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union broke up. This is truly the stuff of history. And this remarkable record of foreign policy triumphs meant nothing to U.S. voters, plagued by a faltering economy and unemployment. They elected Democratic Gov. Bill Clinton, whose foreign policy credentials, earned from his mastery of the historic boundary dispute between Arkansas and Oklahoma over who owned Fort Smith, must have impressed voters in Philadelphia and Fresno.

Finally, take the case of Jimmy Carter, whose skill, mastery of details, endless capacity for hard work and singular stubbornness were all indispensable through 13 days of secret negotiations to broker the 1978 Camp David agreements, which led the following year to the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty. One year later, when the “misery index” (the sum of the nation’s inflation and unemployment rates) pushed 22 percent and the Ayatollah Khomeini held power and American hostages in Iran, the Camp David miracle was forgotten.

The lesson: A perceived foreign policy failure can defeat a president, but even a celebrated foreign policy success will not re-elect him if Americans aren’t working.

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Washington’s Leading Jerk!

February 5, 2011 By 1 Comment

Years ago, two gifted New York writers and Brooklyn natives, Pete Hamill and the late Jack Newfield, met for the first time and spent the evening getting to know each other over cold drinks.

After several hours, as the story goes, Hamill asked Newfield to write the names of the three worst men of the 20th century on one piece of paper and said he would do the same on a separate piece. The names on each man’s list turned out to be identical: Hitler, Stalin and Walter O’Malley, the owner who moved their beloved Dodgers out of Brooklyn to Los Angeles.

Here in Washington, a city with more than its fair share of jerks, we have Washington Redskins football team owner Dan Snyder — who single-handedly makes O’Malley look like Albert Schweitzer and proves going away that he is the entire Eastern time zone’s (yes, that includes Donald Trump) Leading Jerk.

You want evidence? Here it is. Snyder, a self-made multimillionaire, has owned the Redskins for 12 years, during which they have had a total of three winning seasons, even though their rabidly loyal fans fill every seat for every game and the franchise’s market value is the sport’s second highest, at $1.6 billion.

The Washington City Paper is an alternative weekly newspaper that covers local city life, politics, arts and sports. Last November, City Paper sportswriter Dave McKenna wrote, “The Cranky Redskins Fan’s Guide to Daniel Snyder,” a thoroughly researched compilation of the owner’s widely recognized record of meddling and incompetence.

Now two months later, Goliath Dan Snyder wants to use his deep pockets to terrorize this journalistic David through an expensive lawsuit — unless some unrevealed action is taken by the City Paper. (Would that be the firing of Dave McKenna, Mr. Snyder?)

Here is a paragraph from the intimidating letter from the Redskins general counsel to the minor-league hedge fund that owns the City Paper: “Mr. Snyder has more than sufficient means to protect his reputation. We presume that defending such litigation would not be a rational strategy for an investment fund such as yours. Indeed, the cost of litigation would presumably quickly outstrip the asset value of the Washington City Paper.” Does the word shakedown ring a bell?

Of course, everybody agrees that it is unjust to abuse the little people, but most of the time the little people are the easiest to abuse. But maybe not this time.

The bullying of Dan Snyder has provoked a spontaneous sense of outrage that continues to grow. Snyder and the Redskins not only look mean but also dumb. As a public figure, Snyder has basically no chance to win a legal suit unless he could prove that both the facts were wrong and that the reporting involved malice.

Because the City Paper piece included a picture of Snyder with devil’s horns and a mustache and beard, his general counsel writes, “How would you react if you were vilified by an anti-Semitic caricature of you?”

In an as yet unsolved mystery, Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Weisenthal Center in Los Angeles seconds the charge, which has been rejected as baseless by a number of prominent journalists who are Jewish, including national sportswriter John Feinstein, Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic and Gene Weingarten of The Washington Post.

You can easily find for sale online neckties, aprons, T-shirts, coffee mugs, key chains and posters featuring devil’s horns, mustache and beard imposed on the image of the president of the United States, who nobody, not even Glenn Beck, has suggested is Jewish.

Indeed, Dan Snyder is Washington’s Leading Jerk.

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The Sarge Shriver I Knew

January 22, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Losing political campaigns do not build character, but they do reveal character. When your campaign has the strong scent of loser about it, you do get to hear the most creative excuses why local officeholders have an unavoidable conflict that prevents them from sharing any public platform with you when you are campaigning in their hometown. Excuses as believable as — my favorite nephew is graduating from driving school or our family has a longstanding appointment about our late parakeet with the taxidermist.

I first met Sargent Shriver in a losing campaign when he was the 1972 replacement vice presidential choice of Democratic Sen. George McGovern. For anyone unfamiliar with American politics, the McGovern-Shriver ticket carried Massachusetts and the District of Columbia that year, while Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew (both of whom would be forced by their own crimes from office within two years) carried the other 49 states.

As political director of the VP campaign, I was on the campaign trail with Sarge constantly from August until Election Day from before the first campaign event in the morning until after the last stop at night.

In that shared political foxhole — when you know, but never admit, that you’re going to lose — you really get to know somebody. The Sarge Shriver I got to know so well and to like and to admire so much was both a thoughtful, committed Catholic and a thoughtful committed liberal — that rare and wonderful liberal who actually likes and loves fallible, sweating human beings whom he encounters even more than he loves mankind in the abstract.

After working in or covering 11 presidential campaigns, I have come to expect the sometimes vast gulf between the candidate’s controlled, public face and his frequently unappealing, private reality. Sarge Shriver was truly the exception — curious, kindly, personal and optimistic.

Mickey Kantor, who was a poverty lawyer representing migrant farm workers in Florida in the late ’60s when he first met Shriver and who after working in that same 1972 campaign still went on to become secretary of commerce, once put Sarge’s remarkable public career in clear perspective, and it’s worth repeating. Would any of us not be completely thrilled, Kantor asked, if we had accomplished any one of the following: founder and director of the Peace Corps; founder of Head Start; founder of Legal Services for the Poor; creator of Volunteers in Service to America; president and chairman of the Special Olympics; U.S. ambassador to France; and Democratic nominee for vice president?

But beyond his unsurpassed record of public service and of making great differences in the uncelebrated lives of so many, what I recall most vividly about being with Sarge was the love he so obviously felt and freely expressed for his late wife Eunice and for each of their five children — Timothy, Mark, Maria, Bobby and Anthony. I have never seen any political figure — make that any public person — who had a fonder, more loving relationship with his children than Sarge did. And his children deserved the affection and admiration he gave them.

You may notice that there has been no mention here of Sarge’s famous in-laws. I, for one, have always felt that the Kennedy connection was an impediment to the political career he might have had on his own. We will never know. What is unarguable is that this gifted, movie-star handsome man — think Cary Grant or George Clooney — dedicated himself and his life to remembering the forgotten, listening to the ignored and strengthening the weak. We will, sadly, not soon see his like again.

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