The March of History Isn't Supposed to Go Backwards

I was born in 1970.  Five years before, the nation passed a Voters Rights Act that ended a century of Jim Crow discrimination denying a sizable portion of our population from the God-given self-evident right to vote.

I didn't read up on history that much until high school, about 1984-85, around the 20-year anniversary.  They had it in the high school textbooks, which basically makes it ancient history to high schoolers.  For all I've known, the right to vote was meant to be as universal as possible regardless of race or gender (age being the only limiter with the 26th Amendment).

From all that I've studied on history - the slow, sometimes messy, march of ideas and ideologies towards an enlightened liberty and freedom of expression - I've rarely seen any situation where rights, once given, were later taken away.  The only times from what I saw was the Jim Crow era that took away the Black Man's right to vote for 100 years... and even then the VRA did away with that.  The rights came back, and it's been like that my whole life.

And now, I'm dreading that the rights are getting taken away again.  Something that shouldn't be happening.

The conservatives on the Supreme Court ruled in Shelby County v. Holder that a key provision of the VRA - Section 4, which provided metrics on what parts of the nation (Deep South states and key counties) had to get federal pre-clearance on any drastic changes to voting laws - was unconstitutional.  It basically neuters Section 5 (the authority of the Justice Department to act) until Congress ever decides to draw up a replacement metrics system that would pass Court's approval.  And considering the wingnut-controlled House and filibuster-stalled Senate, that will not happen.

My online friends among the Horde are mostly up in arms.  I'm upset as well.  Having witnessed just recently the Republican-controlled Florida government doing their damnedest in 2012 to deny people the right to vote - taking away early voting days, shutting down precincts, trying to pass a strict voter-photo ID bill, forcing county supervisors to purge voter rolls - I am well aware of how close we are to having one of our key rights - the right to vote, as sacred a right as free speech and right to assemble - taken away.  And not just the minorities like Blacks and Hispanics getting denied the right to vote through some complicated redistricting gerrymandering designed to hit ethnics, but poor people of every ethnicity (and a lot of women to boot) denied because they can't afford a photo ID, or college students denied because they tend to relocate often without a primary residence from which to vote.

For all the bad times I've seen our nation go through in my lifetime, I have never seen a moment where the march of history stepped backwards.  We're back to 1950 now, fighting the same damn fight to get people their self-evident right of equality before the law, their self-evident right to speak up and choose their representation, their self-evident right to be Americans.  And if it keeps going like this we'll be back to 1850 and what that all entails.

I hope to God this has the adverse reaction the goddamn Far Right Wingnuts expect: I hope to God this brings out the moderate voters in droves this midterms - the ones who usually don't show up when there's no President to choose - to vote the goddamn Republicans out of office and vote in people who will actually make government work and vote a new VRA into place.

That still hasn't been taken away: getting out the vote.  Not yet.  So there's work to be done.  Getting people registered right now no matter what.  GET IT DONE, PEOPLE.  Get EVERYONE registered right fucking now.  And get the goddamn vote out against the goddamn wingnuts.  Pardon my Swedish.

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Presidential Character: Week Twenty-One, The Effects of Office

It could be said that each President brings to the office a bit of himself, establishing a precedent, affecting a change in how the role is played.  It could also be said that the office affects the man, that the power could change them (the old phrase of power corrupts), although with Barber's research into Presidential Character there's been solid evidence that such changes are rare.  Once the man develops his traits, he carries them with him into the office, defining his tenure.

There are Presidents we've reviewed so far - John Quincy Adams, Franklin Pierce, Rutherford Hayes - who had certain traits but were thwarted in expressing their characters to due to external obstacles.  It still didn't change much of who they were (other than making them more embittered than they already were).  The 21st President, however, may be the first - may be the only President on the roster in fact - to genuinely evolve from an incoming Character trait into another: the first President who changed himself to fit the needs of the office at the moment of decision.

I speak, of course, of Chester A. Arthur.

...Yes, the trivia answer from the third Die Hard movie.  Please try to keep up...

That Arthur changed some of his positions - his political views on the Spoils system in particular - in office shouldn't be that much of a surprise: an assassin hoping to benefit from that Spoils system had killed Arthur's predecessor James Garfield, and even the simple optics of the PR nightmare that created would have made any Stalwart (pro-Spoils) change his label to Half-Breed (civil service reform).  The real surprise is how much of Arthur's previous habits - his laid-back ideology, his crony-ism, affability and desire to be loved - that made him a Passive-Positive character disappeared the second he took the oath to be President.  He went from being a Pass-Pos to an Active-Positive character.

Arthur's Pass-Pos traits could be noted through his aversion to actually running for office: Arthur had never before run for a job.  Every position he'd ever held in public service were through appointments and patronage, a system he wholly bought into as a means for a steady income.  Getting the job of Port Controller of New York (the key port of trade and major tax base) during the Grant administration was the highest office he'd yet held: he oversaw thousands of jobs, through which patronage was doled out to the loyal and politically useful.  There's little evidence that Arthur himself benefited from any massive graft or corruption in the Port office (he did profit from a "moiety" kickback of sorts), but he played his part as a machine politico, working behind the scenes with his good friend Roscoe Conkling.

Even then, reformers in their own party were getting into positions of authority to try and end the "political machines" and the corruption they entail.  By 1878 Hayes, needing to show he was serious about civil service reform, did what he could to remove Arthur - not the most corrupt political boss but the most public - from the Port Controller job.  It didn't work as Hayes had hoped: Conkling by that point was a Senator, and there were still too many Republicans favoring and favored by the Spoils system (Stalwarts) that they were strong enough to deadlock the 1880 Presidential convention against the reformists (Half-Breeds).  The Half-Breeds compromised on Garfield instead of Blaine, and the Stalwarts compromised on making Arthur the Vice-Presidential candidate to balance the ticket.

And as I've said before: ticket balancing never works the way the party hopes it will.  The ticket balancing Veep is usually someone who's NOT representing the majority of the party, merely a faction that has to be appeased.  In this case, it might have meant the Stalwarts through "their boy" Arthur reclaiming office to ensure their Spoils system of political machinery would remain intact.

Arthur defied that, because the moment of history was so blatantly against the Spoils system.  Much like the Civil War, the tides of history had flowed to this shore where corruption could no longer be tolerated or ignored.  In a previous moment just like this, a Pass-Pos like Franklin Pierce refused to rise to the moment: he refused to change himself.  Arthur realized he had to change himself in order to make the changes the nation needed to endure: he changed his Passive-Positive nature to an Active-Positive, pushing himself to the forefront of the civil service reform efforts, overseeing the legislation and vigorously enforcing the law as a President should.

This is why we as a nation think of Chester A. Arthur as a good President and why we barely think of Franklin Pierce at all.

Further signs of how the Presidency changed him: Arthur broke his friendship with Conkling to demonstrate his break with machine politics.  Although he nominated Stalwarts to most of the Cabinet vacancies - the Half-Breeds in Garfield's administration didn't want anything to do with him - Arthur did select men with reformist leanings and a willingness to root out corruption.

Arthur's other legacy involved the immigration issues that arose in the late 19th Century.  America had started as an immigrant's destination and so had cherished the the ideal of being open to any who chose to move here.  But by the 1880s the flow had turned into a flood, and there was a rising anti-immigrant sentiment.  It was worst in the Western states where a massive influx of Chinese was overwhelming the "established" Euro and Hispanic populations.  A series of harsh anti-Chinese bills were passed through Congress... and vetoed by Arthur, who viewed them as violating any foreign policy accords we had with China.  He vetoed other harsh anti-immigrant bills as well but Congress overruled those vetoes.

Arthur also presided over improvements in the U.S. Navy, and vetoed a massive spending bill for being too excessive and not fulfilling the requirements of promoting the defense and general welfare of the nation... even though the nation was dealing with an oversized surplus due to high wartime tariffs to protect Republican business interests.  The veto was popular with the nation but not so with Congress, which overruled Arthur on that (it did reduce the surplus, but caused further issues with corruption down the road).  If his tenure had any serious failures it was failing to break the power of the segregationists enforcing Jim Crow laws in the post-Reconstruction South.  And Arthur's hopes of helping Native American tribes with allotments (allowing individuals to buy up land instead of the tribes collectively) backfired when white speculators bought up the lands instead.

By 1884, Arthur had presided over a hectic and varying successful tenure in office... but because he still wasn't fully trusted by the reformists and was now reviled by his Stalwart friends, Arthur didn't have much chance at a re-election despite his hope for vindication.  It didn't help that health worries were rumored: Arthur was suffering from Bright's Disease and the physical toll was very visible.  He would leave the office in 1885 (and die a year later) but would leave with noticeable affection by a majority of Americans: a widower, Arthur was approached by four different women with marriage proposals on the day he left office.  And he left with Mark Twain - who once called him a "flathead" when Arthur ran the New York Port office - saying "it would be hard to better President Arthur's administration."

It's a pity few One-Termers retain enough of a foothold on our nation's history to be better remembered.  Arthur - willing to defy his personal character and evolve in the Presidency to become a better man - deserves a little more recognition.

Next Week: We'll also be talking about this guy two weeks later.  Yes, the non-consecutive jokes are due to... well, I'll tell you later.

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My Two Cents On Syria

1) It's a mess no matter what Obama does.  Refuse to go in, and we're still dealing with a massive humanitarian disaster with thousands millions of refugees/civilians caught in the firefight.  Going in, we're basically opening up a third battlefront, stretching our military resources and our diplomatic resources ever thinner (dealing with yet another military engagement with Afghanistan still a quagmire and us still not 100 percent disengaged from Iraq, not to mention the diplomatic nightmares of straightening out Lybia, Egypt and other Middle East nations undergoing rough transitions).
2) Obama better go in with eyes wide open: the rebels we're arming are NOT white hats.  We're facing a situation where we may end up forging another wingnut group like the Taliban that took over Afghanistan after we supplied them with weapons to repulse the Soviets.  If we're going to go in to buy this war, we better be prepared to own it.
3) Mission Creep.  When you go in without a clear set of goals, when you go in without a planned exit or alternative solutions when your primary goal gets f-cked in the fog of war, you get mission creep where you keep re-justifying just what the hell you're doing when you're out of options.
This was what happened with Vietnam: our objectives kept changing, our "needs" (actually our political leaders' fear of losing) kept growing, until we got a war we didn't really want or need.  This was Lebanon: we went in thinking just our military presence would calm thing down, it didn't, Marines died and Reagan got us the hell out.  This was Somalia: we went in for humanitarian reasons to end a famine, it changed into trying to stop the in-fighting between factions, got into a firefight we couldn't control, Clinton ended up bugging out (Somalia's still a war-torn mess).  Afghanistan was a response to 9/11 and in a way had to happen, but we went in without a clear objective or defining endgame, and we then piled a second war - the Iraq Invasion/Occupation - on top of it.  And speaking of the Second Persian Gulf War, we went in with an objective - get rid of Saddam - but didn't have a smart plan in place for getting out (the plan for getting out was putting a puppet Chalabi on the throne: when the Iraqis refused him, we got stuck without a Plan B).
When we had clear goals and authority to do so - the first Persian Gulf War is as close to an example we can get in the modern era - we had some success: we went in, we got out.
If Obama's track record is any indication, we can hope (barely) that Mission Creep won't happen: his handling of Libya - minimal ground support, air support to enforce a no-fly zone - showed keen focus on objectives and sticking to them.  And aside from the Benghazi attack - done by insurgents threatening the more open Libyan nation already - the gameplan seemed to work.
Right now, Obama is just arming rebels.  What happens when the means for "victory" requires U.S. air support to enforce a no-fly zone over a more dangerous airspace than Libya's?  What happens if Assad gets outside support (unlikely, but possible)?  We face the real danger of Mission Creep...

Of great concern is that Obama is doing this without taking it to Congress: the whole argument behind the War Powers Act was to stop military adventures without oversight or responsibility.  It'd be nice to think Obama could take this to Congress... except given the GOP's gameplan of obstructing Obama at every turn, I'd worry Congressional Republicans would use it as either 1) a way to attack Obama or 2) a bargaining chip to force Obama to accept a Far Right agenda (tax cuts for the rich) on the economy (or even worse a repeal of Obamacare, just so they could stick the dagger in).

For myself, I trust Obama on this: he didn't overplay his hand on Libya the way Bush the Lesser and Cheney did over Iraq.  I'm just worried about the ongoing precedents of executive adventurism...

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Off-Topic: Gandolfini

The Sopranos changed a lot of how television works anymore.

Before, few shows were designed to hold season-long, series-long narrative arcs (the ones that promised to like The X-Files couldn't really pull it off).  Very few shows were character studies.  Drama itself was viewed as a dying breed as the costs of making them for the major networks were getting too high.  And TV drama was stuck in a kind of self-censored halfway point, unable and unwilling to push the boundaries of decorum to see how far audiences were willing to go.

In stepped HBO, offering an openness of its marketplace to allow for the creation of a show like The Sopranos to flourish.  Looking past the nudity and profanity and gore, this was a show that asked us to examine the life of a mafioso, slightly more sociopathic than most people but in most respects an Everyman stuck with the traumas and dread of middle-class, middle-age self-inflicted hell.

James Gandolfini imbued Tony Soprano with calculated savvy and genuine intellect: a character twice as smart as everybody else in the room yet with little to show for it, but a suppressed rage and a desire to find some honest meaning in the world and his place in it.  Before this, he'd been a Hey It's That Guy background character, providing some memorable performances in small roles such as the ex-stuntman in Get Shorty, or the guy beating up Patricia Arquette in True Romance, talking about how his first kill was such a shock to his system and inadvertently giving Arquette the incentive to kill him.  Tony Soprano made him an A-Lister.

Gandolfini passed away today at 51, preliminary report is due to a heart attack.

Trying to find an appropriate YouTube clip to do him justice.

This might work.  It's from Get Shorty.

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Presidential Character: Week Twenty, Garfield Died For Our Sins

No, NOT THE CAT.

The election of James Garfield as our twentieth President came during the height of the Spoils system within our government.  A political party winning the Executive office (Presidency) would expect to fill government job vacancies - well-paying and in some positions ripe for kickback abuse - by picking various "friends" and underlings who helped with the elections to fill said jobs.

To say corruption ruled within the Spoils system is an understatement: it was at its worst under the Grant administration (review his sad administration for the basic information), with the subsequent Presidency under Hayes doing its utmost to undo the damage (Hayes personally kicked one patronage figure Chester A. Arthur from the key post of Collector of the Port of New York (basically the tax collector at our busiest richest port)).

By 1880 government corruption was a major issue, and civil service reform a major topic.  Unfortunately, such reform needed a focused Congress to make the legislation, and Congress was - still is - a little too divided against itself to make meaningful legislation when it needs to.  Congress has to be prodded to do what's right from an external - sometimes painful - act.

Even though the Republicans at the time were the dominant party - and the one with roughly 16 straight years of corrupt office as a loadstone - they were large enough to have a reform faction gaining influence this election cycle.  Their candidate was Garfield, a long-standing Congressman with perhaps the most jaw-dropping political resume our nation ever saw: college professor and president, lay preacher, lawyer, practiced orator, Civil War volunteer corps leader promoted to battlefield general, voted into Congress and only taking the job (which meant resigning his battlefield position) by direct order of Lincoln himself, serving 16 straight years (which at the time was practically a record, and a clear testament to how the voters liked him).  Garfield had a blemish, accused of taking part of the corruption in Congress during the Grant years, but the charges were never proved and Garfield's performance before and after suggested he was incorruptible.

Garfield's faction - the Half-Breeds, apparently the 19th Century equivalent of RINO - had another candidate on the ballot (Blaine) but Garfield's name quickly rose as a compromise candidate against the Stalwarts (led by political machine boss Conkling) who were pushing for Grant on a third term (were they really THAT tone-deaf?).  After the fractured convention, Garfield was forced to take on Arthur as his Vice-President to balance the ticket.

It was one of the closest popular votes ever - Garfield had roughly 7,700 more votes than Democratic candidate (and fellow Civil War hero) Winfield Hancock - but the Electoral counts wasn't even close (214 to 155).  Garfield also won his Congressional seat again (some states still alow candidates to run for both offices) and was named as Senator-elect by his state of Ohio (making him the only man to ever be Congressman-elect, Senator-elect and President-elect at the same time).

It'd be nice to think that Garfield's reform efforts would begin in earnest and he would act as President with statements and deeds to demonstrate what Character he had.

Within the fourth month of his term of office, Garfield was shot in the back by a disgruntled job-seeker who was convinced he was owed an office under the Spoils system, and was equally convinced that by killing Garfield it would make Arthur President he would get a pardon and a cushy job out of it (I refuse to name the assassin here: most of these jokers do it for the fame and notoriety.  You don't even wanna know what this jerkass wrote as his legal defense during the trial).

The public and political response to such a shooting was, of course, total outrage against the Spoils system itself.  That such a minor nobody would think he "earned" a government job for campaigning for a guy - the best evidence we got that the assassin did anything for the Republicans during the election year was that he handed out some flyers and showed up for a rally or two - became a horrific concept.  Arthur himself, once a symbol of the Spoils system, would champion civil service reform and become its successful advocate (although to say more would cover what should go into next week's Character review).

Garfield's death so early within his tenure tends to make him an "incomplete" figure in Presidential reviews.  Which does a disservice to the man when one looks at what he actually did in those four months:

• He ignored Senatorial courtesy by nominating his Cabinet with people he wanted rather than take suggestions from the Senate first.  This went a long way to breaking the patronage power of Senators like Conkling (who resigned his office and hoped to get re-appointed to the Senate to spite Garfield's obstruction: instead Conkling lost to a party rival, and a victorious Garfield nominated some of Conkling's allies back to their old jobs, now under his patronage and not Conkling).
• Garfield on his own initiative (he was a skilled mathematician and economist) paid back $200 million in maturing bonds earlier than scheduled, which saved the government millions from national debt.
• Garfield pushed for criminal charges and investigations into his own party's involvement in corruption in the postal service.
• Garfield pushed for federally-funded universal education, an effort to break the illiteracy and lack of education for 70 percent of Blacks across the nation.
• His foreign policy focus was on South America and improving relations with neighboring nations.
• He nominated a handful of federal judges and one Supreme Court Justice, always a key legacy of any administration.

Even with this much evidence of what Garfield did and intended to do, it's tricky to nail down his character.  Arguably Garfield was Active (he was to the forefront of a lot of actions his White House undertook), but was he Negative or Positive?  His refusal to compromise on certain issues lean towards the Stubborn traits of an Active-Negative (and his micro-managing of things, he meddled in nearly every Cabinet's department by the sound of it).  However, his proactive efforts - paying off the bonds early, pushing for reform issues - made him a forward-thinking leader.  That most of his actions were not to his own self-interest but to the benefit of others makes Garfield a likely candidate for an Active-Positive President.

The big "what-if" of "what if Garfield hadn't been shot?"  He'd have been a little bit like Hayes, a fellow reform-minded A-P, and Lincoln.  And considering how he wiped out the likes of Conkling, he might have succeeded where Hayes couldn't in terms of getting civil service reform passed.  But it might have taken two terms to do it against a recalcitrant Congress.  It had to take the tragedy of Garfield's assassination to make reform a reality.

Next Week: Can the Office of President Change A Man's Character?  Yes, It Could...

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So Iran Went Purple

That's okay.  I can do purple.

Has it really been four years since the tragedy of the last Iranian election?  Time flies, I guess, when you're distracted by job-hunting and Scott-raging.  So it's got to be 2013, time for the Iranian people to take the moment when the ayatollahs pretend it's not a theocracy and vote for a President.

And they still openly voted for the most moderate candidate allowed to run.  The apparent winner, cleric Hassan Rouhani, is so far garnering just over 50 percent of the vote, avoiding the need for a run-off election.  Rouhani may be a cleric but politically he was positioned as a moderate, and got pretty much every endorsement of the "Khamenei-Can-Kiss-Our-Persian-Butts" crowd.  The preferred candidate for the hard-line crowd - Saheed Jalili - placed a distant third (and by distant I'm talking from-here-to-Pluto range).

Realistically this doesn't change much.  As Grand Ayatollah, Khamenei still holds all the real power (the military and the street enforcers).  But Rouhani can affect significant change and possibly do a lot to end the economic turmoil that years of corruption have created.  Presenting a more moderate leadership might help ease some of the economic sanctions half the globe has placed on Iran over their questionable nuclear program.

If anything, Rouhani's win as the openly accepted "reformer" candidate is a huge extended middle finger aimed in Khamenei's direction.  He did his best to keep real reformer candidates - Rafsanjani especially - off the ballot... and still got slapped in the face by a majority of Iranians.  Four years of bullying has not broken the spirit of the Iranians: they remain defiant.

The buzz is that the candidates from 2009 still under house arrest may be released any minute now.  The streets are filled with celebrants.  Here's hoping this stays peaceful and joyous.

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Twisted Sick Little Fu...

For one thing, Rick "Words Not Usable In Front of Children" Scott vetoed a bill that would have sped up the process to determine a person's mental state to stand trial - which would have freed up a sizable number of people languishing for too long a time in our overcrowded justice system.

Second, Rick "Ha Ha Workers Suck On It" Scott signed into law a bill that would block local and county governments from even voting on requiring companies to provide paid sick leave to their employees.

One of the benefits of employment that I've had since being in the workforce since 1994 has been paid sick leave, which had gone a long way towards giving me time to shake off fevers, pneumonia, minor injuries and other health issues that would have made me a liability at work.  Without sick leave as a benefit, how many employers are now gonna cut back on that... forcing their sick employees to stay at work, spreading germs to fellow employees and customers; and failing at certain functions because, gosh, they can't take time off to heal broken bones or busted ankles?  How much is it gonna cost businesses in the long run with lost work hours from sick or wounded employees or drastic downturn in customers due to unhealthy environs?

As God is my witness, I will never understand why anyone outside of CEO ranks making under $60,000 a year should ever vote Republican within the next 40 years.  These guys are completely against decent workplace rules, decent pay, decent benefits...  I can't understand why anyone concerned with workplace safety and decent treatment of employees could have ever voted for these guys over the last 20 years.  Between killing off our pensions and killing off our healthcare benefits, the modern Republicans have been the biggest disaster to the American middle class since the 1950s.

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