President Character: Week Twenty-Two, Gone To The White House

When we write of Grover Cleveland, we write of a man best-known to Americans as "The Guy Who Served Two Separate Terms".  A guy good for a punchline in the Simpsons/Futurama 'Verse.  There are other things he should be known for.

He should be known as one of the few Presidential candidates to win the popular vote three straight times (FDR is the other, and he's got the excuse of being a Four-Termer).  He didn't win the Presidency the second time because of the Electoral College.  Cleveland was also the first Democrat elected to the Presidency since 1860 (Johnson was not elected to it, Tilden should have won it but the corruption of the electoral system in 1876 blocked him), breaking the Republican monopoly on the office of 24 years.

He's also a candidate that had one of the biggest bombshells of a Presidential campaign ever: the revelation days after his nomination that he had fathered a child out of wedlock (he was enjoying the bachelor lifestyle up to that point).  It didn't help that he publicly acknowledged the child as his (although he and his supporters took pains to note he provided financial support).  Republicans gleefully took to the streets chanting "Ma! Ma! Where's My Pa!"  This was a huge load on Cleveland's election hopes, because outside of his personal lifestyle, Cleveland was arguably the most incorruptible political figure this nation ever saw: this was a guy with a reputation for vetoing bad bills, for gutting out corruption in local and state office, for going against Tammany Hall (the political machine of the 19th Century) and winning.  Cleveland was quoted as saying "Public Office is a Public Trust" and he damn well meant what he said.

His opponent was one of the Grant-era ethically-challenged congressmen, Blaine, who was reportedly pious in his personal life but up to his hips in corruption in his public job.  As a result, the debate became a question between voting for a man with questionable personal habits but clean policy record or for a man with questionable policy records and clean personal habits.

And it was a close race, the mudslinging involved one of the nastiest since Andrew Jackson's era and unrivaled until, well, Clinton and/or Obama's.  It took a last-minute PR faux pas of a Protestant preacher denouncing Irish voters in New York to switch the vote there to Cleveland's favor, in which he squeaked out  a win by 1,000 votes.

Democrats responded to the Republican rally cry by answering "Gone to the White House Ha! Ha! Ha!"

And what did Cleveland do once he reached the White House?

He vetoed more Congressional bills than any other President in history.  Granted, a lot of those bills were individually written to pension out war veterans rather than there being one over-arching congressional bill that would have covered them all.  But Cleveland wasn't the sort to let a single bill pass his inspection, and he didn't agree that Congress should override the veterans' Pension Office that had denied those pension petitions already.  But this was a sign of how Cleveland worked: he believed in limited government in the small-c conservative way, and every political stance - reducing the tariffs (taxes) because there was an ongoing surplus, supporting the gold standard over silver (which meant cheap money) - reflected that.

All in all, Cleveland demonstrated a lot of the traits - highly driven but unimaginative, reactive rather than active, Uncompromising above all - that are found in Active-Negative Presidents.  Granted: he never demonstrated obsessive self-interest and self-loathing most Negatives have, and had the love and faith in public office that an Active-Positive has, probably putting him more on the borderline between the two traits than most other Presidents.  But he was more A-N than A-P.

I'd say more, but there's still another blog entry I gotta write on the guy.  Non-consecutive blog entries, after all we got a schedule to maintain and Cleveland won't begrudge us that...

Next Week: Benjamin's just this guy, ya know?

Read more ...

The Republicans' Real Problem If They Can't Pass This Immigration Bill

It's not that the Republicans will lose favor even more with the growing Hispanic population - a voting bloc the GOP is convinced could lean conservative enough to their side - if they fail to pass the bill the Senate just signed off on.  It's not like there's a lot that would convince ethnic voters to side wholeheartedly with a party that just succeeded in shredding voting rights for said ethnic voters.  Like Conor notes over on The Atlantic:

It's true that there's a nativist element in the Republican Party that talks about illegal immigrants as if they are sub-human. There are, as well, other Republicans more restrained in their rhetoric, but who give off the impression that they aren't huge fans of Hispanic immigrants. This definitely alienates Hispanic voters, but it is unclear to me that the passage of immigration reform would win over these people -- whether a reform bill passes or not, that element will still exist in the Republican coalition. So long as the questionable rhetoric continues, so will the mistrust...

If the bill passes, there won't be a huge surge of Hispanic voters over the Republicans: the party would at least retain a sizable portion of that vote (a lot more than the 1-2 percent of Black voters still voting Republican... yeah the last polling showed close to ZERO percent but I'm pretty sure there had to have been a few Blacks who went Romney... why I don't know, but I digress) and have a more diverse base of voters for the next Presidential cycle.  But what would happen if the GOP House - with a sizable number of Far Right congresspersons who aren't huge fans of "illegals" and "freeloaders" - failed to take up the issue, to pass a similar bill that would get worked out in committee and sent to the President for a signature?

They'll still be in the same leaky boat in terms of Hispanic outreach, obviously, but the real damage will be to the Republicans' credibility as a functioning political party.  It's not just the Hispanics they'll be losing, it will be the good-sized middle-of-the-road voters, the moderates or non-ideologue voters.

Even with all the obstructionist efforts the GOP has pulled since retaking the House in the 2010 midterms, there was at least this perception that the Republicans were, well, doing things.  They'd at least tried to present some ideas in terms of budgeting and government oversight (albeit obsessed with tax cuts and deregulation as the CURE FOR EVERYTHING), they at least looked the part of a political party.  Perception means a lot in politics: looking competent is more valuable than actually being competent.

But this would be the break with that perception, a huge one.  There's been media buzz about the GOP fracturing ever since the earlier vote in the House for Hurricane Sandy relief that ended up passing without a majority of Republican votes.  The House is now presented with a bipartisan Senate bill (as close to bipartisan as possible: it passed a Cloture vote, which is damn near miraculous this day and age), and a bill on immigration reform that the media (and thus the nation) perceives as a must-pass for the Republicans.  If they can't even get this out of committee, the perception of party dysfunction would be overwhelming to everyone outside of the Tea-Party, anti-immigrant, anti-government crowd (and the Tea Party wingnut faction is not as big as the Fox Not-News commentators think it is).

There's not even a guarantee Speaker Boehner could pull off an attempted "poison pill" bill, something on immigration that would be so anathema to the Senate Democrats that the compromise committee that works on fixing disparate Senate-House bills would refuse to deal and thus give Boehner the excuse to blame the libruls.  The wingnut faction of the House is so opposed to immigration they may refuse to vote on anything close to reform... and if there's enough of them, Boehner won't be able to get a floor vote on it, even with that poison pill.  The blame will end up entirely on the GOP House. (if Boehner does get a bill passed with that poison pill, there's still no guarantee he'll be able to claim the Democrats killed it if the two houses can't agree).

The perception in politics will no longer be that "Congress is dysfunctional" because after all the Senate got something done.  The perception will be "The Republican Party is dysfunctional."  And while the Far Right won't be surprised or angry about it - after all, it's the kind of Party they want - whatever is left of the Center-Right and Moderate GOP voters (the RINOs that haven't fled yet) could well walk away.

The thing that always upsets me as an independent voter is that there's been enough middle-of-the-road, non-party-affiliated voters over the last 10 years who gave and still give the Republicans the benefit of the doubt.  Having been burned by the Norquists and Limbaughs and Breitbarts that have taken over the party, I just couldn't grok how any moderate voters, any non-wingnut voters, were still voting for the ( R ) bracket.  But one of the things about moderate voters isn't loyalty to a party, it's the desire to choose and vote for a candidate that creates and maintains an image of competency, of ability.  They'll vote for a Republican if that Republican looks capable of walking and chewing bubble gum at the same time.

But a Republican that's part of a House of Representatives that couldn't even pass a symbolically important immigration reform bill?  The perception of incompetence would be more destructive than the perception of that Republican being a hypocrite.

Despite the survival tactics that the Republicans use for midterm elections - the Congress-only, state Governor elections - that rely on low voter turnout and only the extremists voting, there's always the risk of playing it too close to the wire.  While the average (read: moderate) voters won't turn out for midterms, they could turn out in enough numbers to voice their discontent against the party with the most at stake (read: the ones running Congress).  During good years, the party in control tends to stay in control of Congress.  During bad years, during sessions where the majority party is viewed as incompetent, failing, broken... you get the turnover.  Look to 2006: the failure of leadership as the Iraq occupation turned sour was a major key to the Republicans losing to the Democrats in both houses.  Look to 2010: the session-long struggle to pass health-care reform made the Democrats look out-of-touch and unfocused (even if they still passed it: perception, remember, counts for a lot), letting the Republicans retake the House.

The Republicans may have an advantage with gerrymandered districts that favor them despite the larger vote totals for Democrats, but a good number of those gerrymandered districts are stretched thin and more vulnerable than they seem.  Get enough moderate Republicans and NPA voters disgruntled, get a Democratic candidate in one of those districts who can walk and chew gum, and you could well see a 51-48 victory for that Democrat.

The only things saving the Republicans at the moment are those gerrymandered districts and the possibility they can (and will) rewrite state voting laws to block all the voters they hate.  But fail at this vote, fail to maintain even a semblance of competency... the Republicans can suffer even with the voters they hope would be on their side, the ones they'll let past the vote-blocking.

Try to remember this about the moderate/centrist voters: they vote for competency, not ideology.  An incompetent Congress will lose those voters regardless of geography or gender or race.  And there's more of us moderate voters than the wingnuts will admit.  Count on it.

Read more ...

In This Case, the March Of History Goes Forward, Thank God

Yes, yesterday's SCOTUS ruling killing off voting rights was a huge bummer.

Today, the Supreme Court rulings - in separate decisions - that the federal DOMA and California's Prop 8 were unconstitutional turned into a major gain for civil rights.

In truth, the SCOTUS rulings are not a final say on the matter.  Overturning DOMA meant civil unions were possible and that states that passed same-sex marriage laws could uphold them, it didn't grant gay marriage rights across the nation.  And the Prop 8 decision was that the persons who brought suit to the Supreme Court - third-party groups that backed the referendum, not the state of California itself - did not have legal standing to do so.

Still. This is a great day to be Pro-People.  Play on, Don Coates:

I haven't read any of my fellow writers yet, but I did want to take a moment to say how important this moment is in the war against inequality. I was tempted to say "social inequality" but in America, there simply is no real way to separate the social, the political and the economic. When the larger country decided to stand aside as South Carolina went about the business of disenfranchising half its citizenry, the weapon was political, but the implications were economic and social. With no access to the franchise, black people lacked the means to protect their wealth. The poverty of wealth which befell them then reinforced their status as social pariahs, and their status as social pariahs reified (sp?) the racist justifications for their disenfranchisement and the inglorious cycle was complete...
It must never be forgotten that in America, the right to marry is the right to protect one's family. Certainly the pictures of same-sex couples embracing and hugging warm the heart and are a powerful weapon in country that prides itself on fairness...
The state repossessing a couple's wealth because it finds them icky, is wholly unjust. It recalls a particularly horrible aspect of slavery--the assault on the families of people deemed to be outside the law. There is a particular war here, which better people than me can speak to. But power is at the core of the long war which began sometime in the mid-17th century with the passage of the first slave codes. The prohibitions against same-sex marriage are not simply about witholding the right to be pretty in a dress or dashing in a tux (though I would deny no one their day.) It is about ensuring that only certain kinds of people, and certain kinds of families, are able to amass power, and with that power, influence over the direction of our society...
It is wrong to strip people of wealth because you are bigot. It is wrong to strip people of the right to name their caretakers because you are afraid. It is wrong to make war on people because you can not get over yourself. And though today we may say that we have advanced, through much of this country, the wrong continues unabated...

The fight's not over, I'll agree on that point.  But this is akin to winning Gettysburg: there may be another two years of war but the end - marriage equality - is in sight.  And as we advance on these rights, making them stronger and making our nation stronger, we can keep fighting for all the other rights - the right to vote, the right to earn a fair wage, the right to live healthy - that are self-evident (Yup, I'm enjoying that phrase).

So let the celebrating begin!

Yeah, that's right.  Even the heteros can gay-marry now.  Deal with it, Mr. Huckabee.

Read more ...

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.

Read more ...

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.

Read more ...

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...

Read more ...

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.

Read more ...