Showing posts with label Steve Huntley. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Steve Huntley. Show all posts

Sunday, September 9, 2012

The Line of the Day Award Goes to "Hope Needs More Time"

The line of the day award goes to the ever-incisive Steve Huntley for The Chicago Sun Times, here:

Hope needs more time. That was President Barack Obama’s message in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention Thursday night. But a country that was forced to live on hope for four years and rewarded with dreary unemployment, falling middle class income and depressed home values may not be ready for another dose of lofty national goals based on nothing more than oratory.

Hope is the very stuff of ideology, whether political or religious.

Religious ideology makes life tolerable by offering faux rewards in the forms of community, sacraments and liturgy with hope of eternal life deferred to the next one. Forgiveness in the here and now goes with all that, a sort of foretaste of the salvation to come. Or it offers assurances of the imminent in-breaking of the kingdom of God with the second coming of Christ, a recrudescent hope which litters the historical landscape since the time of Jesus. Such assurances are often accompanied by religious experiences of being "born again", or of so-called miracles, which require new exempla over time to validate the ideology as the second coming fails to materialize and the experience flattens. Certain Jews say year upon year "Next year, in Jerusalem." Muslims await the last imam, fourteen centuries after Muhammad.

But political ideology promises, promises and promises, with not much to show for it even in democracy, which promptly turns it out when it is still healthy enough to do so. The American record in this regard is mixed. Woodrow Wilson was not turned out. A terrible, costly and demoralizing war was the consequence. FDR was not turned out. Another terrible, costly and demoralizing war was the consequence. But LBJ was turned out, in the throes of a period when first principles were readdressed selfishly under what was decided was an existential threat to the next generation. Say what you will about the '60s generation, war in America stopped being involuntary. 

Ideologues sometimes become dictators, in which case they just go on promising. FDR did this but in the extenuating circumstances of global war, flaunting the long-standing American tradition that presidents serve but two terms. A free people finally came to its senses and put a stop to that with the 22nd Amendment, but not until after the fact.

In other times and other places dictators install themselves permanently, as was the case with one Robert Mugabe. Barack Obama has made no secret of his admiration of such like, openly expressing his dissatisfaction with the constraints placed on him by our form of government at the same time he voices his admiration for the lack of such constraints in places such as China. Are Americans wrong to be disquieted by this?

Hope needs more time. But for what, exactly?    



Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Ideologues Never Prosper

Steve Huntley of The Chicago Sun Times has a firm grasp on reality. It would be nice if Obama and the Democrat left did, he thinks, not appreciating well enough himself that "compromise" is not in the ideologue's lexicon, and never can be, which is the real problem. Obama just doesn't belong in The White House. As of tonight, 52% would seem to agree. Here's an excerpt:

Here is the real story about the current gridlock in Washington -- no willingness to compromise by Democrats. The Senate is not broken; it is performing a function the Founders intended -- subjecting the enthusiasms of the House to careful scrutiny. And the filibuster is serving its purpose of protecting the rights of the minority in Congress. Together they can help force compromise and bipartisanship. Republicans had to turn to the filibuster because Democratic leaders in Congress shut them out of sweeping legislation such as the health-care bill.

Even so, the GOP-party-of-no excuse for inaction is largely bogus. Until last month, Democrats had a filibuster-proof 60 votes in the Senate to go with their House super-majority. They couldn't accomplish anything because they couldn't get moderate Democrats to sign on to the liberal program.

Left-wing Democrats saw the 2008 election of President Obama as a mandate for transformative change. In reality voters were rejecting Bush and turning to Obama to address the nation's economic crisis. Instead, taking Rahm Emanuel's famous advice, liberals saw the crisis as an opportunity to advance a big-government, big-spending agenda.

The voters rebelled. The Tea Party movement sprang up like a spring flower and blossomed. Poll numbers for Obama and health-care overhaul sank. Republicans scored big wins in New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts. What would have been unthinkable a few months ago -- a return to GOP control of the House -- now seems possible. Democrats are putting their fingers to the wind and seeing trouble ahead -- with Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana the latest to forgo re-election.

Yet Democratic leaders still don't seem to get the message.

Click here for the rest.