Obama Rally

We attended a rally for President Obama this evening on the Pentacrest of the University of Iowa. I had gotten tickets easily yesterday (there were clandestine places around town where non-students could get tickets without standing in a long line (students had to stand in long lines the day before)). The gates opened at 1 p.m. for what was hoped to be a 4 p.m. appearance by Obama, his wife, Michele, VP Biden, and his wife, Jill. At 1 p.m. I watched Obama wind up a speech in New Hampshire. There was no way he was going to be in Iowa until 5 p.m. Besides, there was rain going through mid-afternoon. I was not going to stand out in the rain. My wife was in a meeting downtown until about 4 p.m., and she walked over from there. The rain had stopped. She called while standing in a line a couple of blocks long, though moving quickly. I waited until I’d heard the president’s plane had landed, then walked down to campus. There was virtually no line when I got there, after 5 p.m., though it was (as expected) crowded once inside the gates. I called my wife and found her not too far from where I’d entered. A couple of women behind us said they’d been there since 2 p.m. but had lost their place closer to the stage when they had gone to the port-o-potty. They asked if we could move a bit so they could see. We did, though I told them they wouldn’t be able to see anything anyway. And that was the case. Biden came on first and gave a brief introduction to Obama. Then Obama came on and gave a 30-minute speech. We couldn’t see either Biden or Obama, made all the more difficult by people holding up signs or cameras or children. At one point I tried to take a picture with my iPhone, holding it up over the crowd in front of me, but all that came out was the backs of the heads of the crowd in front of me. The speech was pretty much boilerplate, with Iowa and Iowans inserted where this morning it had been New Hampshire and New Hampsireites. Tomorrow it will be another state. The sound was loud, though echoed off the walls of the buildings, so occasionally wasn’t intelligible. But that didn’t matter. At the end of Obama’s speech, Michele and the Bidens joined him onstage, and I think I caught a glimpse of their backs for maybe a quarter of a second, and that only because I recognized the color of the dresses Michele and Jill were wearing at the New Hampshire rally earlier that I’d seen on TV (blue and green, respectively). But I didn’t go to see the candidates or wives or hear the speeches. I was just interested in the spectacle – the crowd, the staff, the hawkers of buttons and caps and t-shirts, the media, the security (helicopters overhead, black cars with flashing lights, secret service on top of buildings with binoculars and guns, secret service roaming the crowd, unobtrusive in their stiff demeanor, dark suits, and earpieces). Political rallies are theater. More like Shakespeare’s theater, though, than contemporary theater: The most interesting things are happening outside and around the stage, not on it. The crowd and the setting and the just being there are the reasons for being there.

Obama on 60 Minutes

It was refreshing, heartening to watch and listen to President Obama last night on 60 Minutes, speaking intelligently, knowledgeably, seriously, articulately in full sentences and paragraphs about his decision to take out Osama bin Laden in a risky special forces mission. It was, in a word, presidential, and it had to remind all of us who voted for him in November 2008 why we had done so. There have been moments – too many – when I’ve questioned the wisdom of my vote – his caving in on a health care plan that included single payer before the negotiations even began, his fumbling arms-length participation in that debate for most all of 2009, his reversals on Guantanamo, his diddling on “don’t ask, don’t tell,” his weak stimulus program, and his apparent inattention if not indifference to jobs. His ability to speak has consistently been impressive, though we mostly see him in scripted and teleprompted appearances or semi-scripted press conferences. What we saw last night was a lengthy interview that went beyond his speaking ability to reveal much about his thought, his decision-making process, his concerns, his doubts, and most important, his ability to take a military and political risk (55-45, he put it) that I don’t know how many others, particularly his many detractors, would have taken. There’s an obvious comparison that could be made here, probably in a humorous way, between Obama’s performance in both the raid and the interview and our previous president’s performance in attempts at both thought and speaking the English language, but I’ll let it go with this apophatic sentence (you can look it up). But I only hope that this becomes a turning point and that it’s followed in the next 18 months by similarly resolved, risky, and persuasive action, in both foreign and domestic policy. I do so want to vote for him again.

Donald Trump, Clown Candidate

Probably the most humorous sidebar to today’s release of Obama’s “official long-form birth certificate” (although there are many) was Brian Williams’s introduction to the story this evening on the NBC Nightly News, when he misread the prompter and referred to Obama’s birth certificate as a “Gift Certificate.” But then there is also the idiot billionaire candidate clown Donald Trump who stepped off his helicopter in New Hampshire and claimed credit for the release of the certificate (finally!) – "Today I am very proud of myself because I have accomplished something that nobody else has been able to accomplish" – before adding, “Now, we have to look at it, we have to see, is it real” – and then stepping into a new goofy conspiracy theory about Obama’s education – "How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?" he asked the Associated Press. "I'm thinking about it, I'm certainly looking into it. Let him show his records." He continued darkly, "There are a lot of questions that are unanswered about our president." There certainly aren’t many questions unanswered about The Donald. He’s a publicity whore who will say or do anything to get attention from a more than willing pimp media. But the saddest side of this tale is how many people still buy into this bile (one is one too many), diverting the debate in this country from what we should be talking about (three wars, a recession, record joblessness, debt and deficit?) and to a quest for face-time on the cable news networks. If the Book of Revelation were to be written today, it would have to include at least a few verses devoted to the fifth horseman of the Apocalypse, Fox News.

LBJ's Great Society

Having come of age in the 1960s, during the Vietnam War, my memories of President Lyndon B. Johnson revolve mostly around that war, and they’re not positive (“Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids have you killed today?”). Yet walking through the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum in Austin today, I was jolted by the reminder of the expansive range of liberal legislation he was able to shove through in less than six years as a part of his Great Society reform of the economy, education, health care, the environment, and the arts and humanities. Just consider:

1963 (he took office in late November)
Higher Education Facilities Act
The Clean Air Act
The Vocational Education Act

1964
Inter-American Development Bank Act
Civil Rights Act of 1964
Urban Mass Transportation Act
Federal-Aid Highway Act
Criminal Justice Act
Food Stamp Act
Wilderness Act
National Arts Cultural Development Act

1965
Manpower Act
Older Americans Act
Social Security Amendments of 1965
Voting Rights Act of 1965
Housing and Urban Development Act
Public Works and Economic Development Act
Department of Housing and Urban Development Act
National Foundation of the Arts & Humanities Act
Amendment of Federal Water Pollution Control Act
Amendment to the Immigration and Naturalization Act
Higher Education Act

1966
Child Nutrition Act
Child Protection Act

1968
National School Lunch Act

Obviously there wasn’t a lot done after the first two years of his administration, but the war in Vietnam and race riots in the states had taken over the nation’s attention. And really, there wasn’t much more to do by that time. I can’t imagine the envy Barack Obama would feel if he were to stroll through the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum. Just look at what Johnson accomplished in his first 13 months in office. Did Obama get anything through in his first 13 months (when he had a Democratic controlled House and Senate)? And I can’t imagine he’s going to have any luck getting much through in the next couple of years, now that he’s lost the House. I’m probably not alone in looking back at the 60s and focusing on the war and social unrest. But perhaps we should be looking back at the 60s and seeing what it was LBJ and others were doing to get things done.