Nicer Than Cary Grant In "North By Northwest"?

Retiring after over 40 years as doorman at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, Ed Trinka says:

Although he had met too many famous people to name favorites, [Richard] Nixon was "one of the nicest men I have met," he said.

Sweeping Judgements

When I heard this line from President Obama's radio address this morning, it sounded angrier than it reads:

I didn’t come here to do the same thing we’ve been doing or to take small steps forward, I came to provide the sweeping change that this country demanded when it went to the polls in November.

It's one thing to repudiate business as usual. It's another to ridicule incremental change so blithely. Cautiousness is often a virtue in a leader, even in a crisis -- especially in one. Just because everyone tells Obama he's FDR doesn't mean he is. Obviously every President has a tendency to think that God or fate put him in office to accomplish great things. But if there's a consensus among economists who are as smart as or smarter than Obama that a massive increase in the size and scope of the federal government is what the economy most needs right now, I haven't seen it. Instead, Obama appears to be using the economic crisis to accomplish his ideology-based agenda. Before the election, he gave no hints about the scope of his ambitions, so he can't really say he was elected to provide sweeping change. Instead, he was elected because Lehman Bros. tanked and people had grown disenchanted with George W. Bush's ineffectiveness.

Won't Obama's move to the left empower Republicans, in the same way Bill Clinton's attempt at nationalized health care and other leftward moves set up the GOP's 1994 landslide? Obama doesn't seem to be worried. As he denounces politics as usual, he gives every impression of beginning to think that he's immune to them.

I don't think a President should resort to incrementalist policies just to be reelected. But he should be attracted to them when no one is sure if more dramatic moves are the right thing to do. Even Obama's most consistent new-media supporter, Andrew Sullivan, says Obama's policies are radical and untested. We're not a radical country. Obama was smart enough to know that 2008 was the Democrats' year and that Hillary Clinton was vulnerable. He earned his win. But if he arrogantly overreaches and forces policies down our throats that blunt a recovery by muffling enterprise and economic growth, he deserves to lose.

The terrible thing to imagine is how bad off the United States would have to be for the President to be hobbled in 2010 and defeated in 2012. So I don't agree with opportunistic Republicans who admit they want him to fail. That's a grossly irresponsible position to take, tantamount to wanting to lose a war to achieve political gain. I want him to succeed. I'm just beginning to think he won't.

Obama To Marines: "You Got The Job Done"

The New Nixon's Frank Gannon likes what he heard from the President at Camp Lejeune.

37 37 Years Ago In Shanghai

The AP:

[On Feb. 28,] 1972, President Richard M. Nixon and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai issued the Shanghai Communique at the conclusion of Nixon's historic visit to China.

Boots On The Ground, But Not Especially Wet

Gov. Jindal has been accused of exaggerating his anecdote about Sheriff Harry Lee during Katrina.

The Silent Majority Lives

A friend sent a link to the Rick Santelli "Rant of the Year" on CNBC, which attracted the White House's ire but which I'd missed until now. Hard to see why people got so upset. He obviously had the moral support of the folks on the trading floor. It's not any harsher that Keith Olbermann's periodic rants, though it comes from a different ideological perspective (or in Santelli's case, a non-ideological, middle-class, "Network," I'm-not-going-to-take-it-anymore kind of a place). Interesting that he invokes RN's silent majority.

Perfect Songs: "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright" (1962)

Bob Dylan, with a video montage by Alexthebarbarian

Barack, Not Burke

American Tory Andrew Sullivan, who helped fuel the Obama phenomenon with a seminal 2007 article in the "Atlantic," now concedes, on release of the new federal budget, that those who said the President was a social democrat, not a moderate, were right:

He won the stimulus debate long before the Republicans realized it (they were busy doing tap-dances of victory on talk radio, while he was building a new coalition without them). And now, after presenting such a centrist, bi-partisan, moderate and personally trustworthy front, he gets to unveil a radical long-term agenda that really will soak the very rich and invest in the poor. Given the crisis, he has seized this moment for more radicalism than might have seemed possible only a couple of months ago.

As for whether these are the right policies -- whether the American people, no matter how economically anxious they are right now, really want the federal government to equalize wealth in addition to opportunity -- well, Sullivan's just not sure:

The risk is, at least, a transparent risk. If none of this works, he will have taken a massive gamble and failed. The country will be bankrupt and he will have one term. His gamble with the economy may come to seem like Bush's gamble in Iraq. But if any of it works, if the economy recovers, and if the GOP continues to be utterly deaf and blind to the new landscape we live in, then we're talking less Reagan than FDR in long-term impact.

It's going to be a riveting first year, isn't it?

Yes, certainly, if you're in it for the sheer theater, which many in Sullivan's business are, especially the so-called old media, which often seem to want to turn politics and policy into sports. I hadn't thought it of Sullivan until now. As much as he admires Edmund Burke and Ronald Reagan, how can he be so blase? If I may state the bleeding obvious, people's lives, careers, businesses, and fortunes are at stake, not to mention the mighty engine of wealth on which so much of the world still stakes its hopes and dreams. As most conservatives know, or at least believe, a national government can grow and consume to a point where initiative and enterprise begin to die as systems fundamentally though not exclusively based on risk and reward are replaced by ones based on safety and equality.

Perhaps Sullivan is one of those who believe that the pendulum always swings between progressivism and conservatism. You can't get back to one without a corrective rooted in the other. The difficulty is that the point over which the pendulum swings seems only to move leftward. Under Reagan, for instance, the rich may have gotten richer, but the government didn't get smaller. As anyone who's worked with big government will tell you, its denizens have infinite means at their disposal of protecting their interests. Big government doesn't shrink. Ever.

As one who argued that Obama would move to the center, I find his profoundly ideological budget, which seems to seek to exploit class anger for the sake of arrogating more power to the federal government, to be deeply disappointing. Knowing (or reading) Sullivan, he may think that the GOP will now have to grow up and talk about its own mature vision (if it has one) of the state vs. individual freedom. Let's hope so.

Rebuking Us Moderates

The quote of the day from Sojourners:

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning.

Frederick Douglass, from his speech celebrating West India Emancipation Day (August, 1857)

Aunt Edna's Prayer

Having Friday off gives me the opportunity to catch up on some projects on my wish list, including making sure to transcribe (for the sake of future liturgists) Clark Griswold's interfaith prayer for Aunt Edna from "National Lampoon's Vacation" (for which actor Chevy Chase, who owns Griswold like Olivier owned Richard III, no doubt deserves substantial writing credit along with screenwriter John Hughes):

O God:
Ease our suffering in this, our moment of great despair
Yea, admit this good and decent woman into thine arms in the flock in thine heavenly area up there
And Moab, he laidest down in the land of the Canaanites
And yea, though the Hindus speak of Karma, I implore you
Give her a break.
Baruch Ata, Hallelujah!