Chris Powell: Will Conn. politicians summon courage to ask Biden to retire?
Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal said he was “concerned” about Biden’s low polls.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Have the country's two major political parties ever been as disgraceful as they are today?
Many Republicans remain devoted to Donald Trump despite his dishonesty, recklessness, hatefulness, cruelty and authoritarianism. Or maybe Republicans are devoted to Trump because of those characteristics. For as he runs for president again, Trump continues to embody the contempt fairly felt by millions about their government, even if contempt is no way to run a country.
But that contempt is so high because of President Biden, a Democrat, and his candidacy for re-election. Republicans won't turn away from Trump while polls show him ahead of Biden. What is most remarkable and appalling is that while polls show that Democrats overwhelmingly want their party to nominate someone other than Biden, no Democratic leaders of national standing dare to represent them, even as polls say a "generic" Democrat might easily defeat Trump.
There also wasn't much courage in the Democratic Party in a similarly disastrous time, in 1967 and 1968, when the country was deeply troubled by the unnecessary and mismanaged war in Vietnam. But there was some courage, though there were fewer mechanisms for challenging party leaders than there are today.
Back then party primary elections to choose delegates to national presidential nominating conventions were not common. But one Democrat, U.S. Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy, of Minnesota, answered the call for a challenger to President Lyndon B. Johnson, mobilized anti-war Democrats, showed that most Democrats wanted change, and caused the president to announce that he wouldn’t run for re-election in 1968.
While presidential primaries now are held in most states and Biden is a disaster politically, he is not being seriously challenged within his party, though supporting Biden empowers Trump.
In this regard Connecticut's congressional delegation, all five members of the House and both members of the Senate, is especially disappointing. Six of the seven are and long have been safe politically. The seventh, 5th District U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes, has a competitive district but her greatest vulnerability as she seeks re-election next year will be running with Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket.
That is, all seven Connecticut Democrats in Congress could survive politically if they challenged the president's renomination. But they have had little to say about the disaster Biden's renomination would portend. Only U.S, Sen. Richard Blumenthal seems to have even acknowledged the danger, saying the other day that he is "concerned" about Biden's awful standing in the polls.
Gov. Ned Lamont, the state's leading Democrat, seems happy with the prospect of Biden's renomination and might prefer to preserve his high approval rating by staying out of national politics. But the governor usually has a good sense of how the political winds are blowing and surely has seen that they are filling Trump's sails. The governor might afford to spend some political capital by articulating what even most Democrats know about Biden -- that he shouldn’t run for re-election.
Confidentially, Connecticut's members of Congress might explain that if they admit that the president would serve the party and the country best by retiring, they might be cut off from the federal patronage that flows to the state. But how much patronage will Connecticut get under a Trump administration, which likely would come with Republican majorities in both houses of Congress?
As long as the Democrats seem likely to renominate Biden, thereby increasing the chances that the Republicans will renominate Trump, there probably will be stronger than usual minor-party candidates. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., shunned by the Democrats and now running independently, is getting unusually strong support in polls. The fusion ticket contemplated by the No Labels organization might do even better.
Then the national vote might be divided substantially four ways, putting almost every state in play in the Electoral College, risking strange results and leaving the country even angrier and more divided.
Even if Democratic leaders really believe that Biden is doing a good job, the people strongly disagree. Or maybe Democratic leaders secretly think that Trump's return wouldn't be much worse than four more years of Biden.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net).
-END-
Llewellyn King: Is Biden perilously trying to hide his age?
“Old Age’’, by Robert Smirke (1752-1845), British painter
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Is Joe Biden hiding in plain sight?
Is his most extensive public effort these days fending off signs of age, hiding his infirmities, and clinging to the hope that he can still win in the election just over a year from now?
Sotto voce, the savants of the Democratic Party worry and complain in private that Biden is too old and infirm and should move over before it is too late. In public, they point to the health of the economy, receding inflation and the high employment rate, and foreign-policy wins.
But indeed, the Joe Biden of today isn’t the Joe Biden of yesterday.
The Biden we in the corps knew over the years in Washington was accessible, friendly, keen to please — and he talked. How he talked. Biden would give a speech, but he didn’t stop. He seemed to tack a second speech onto the first.
Biden didn’t change the course of history with his eloquence, nor set the audience to thinking in ways they hadn’t previously, but he was easy to take.
Now, he seems to approach the podium with caution, reading the speech with a just-get-me-through-this stoicism. The man who used to love the microphone appears to fear it.
Likewise, the man who used to enjoy the cut and thrust of interacting with the press eschews press conferences. He doesn’t hold them.
This absence of press conferences isn’t unimportant. They are messy and unruly, but they are where the acuity of the leader is tested and on display. They are where we might get a look at how he might be in negotiation with foreign leaders.
Press conferences are part of the democratic process, where the president reports to the public through the press. Like question time in the British House of Commons, they are where we see the president in action.
Boastful press releases — which every administration puts out — are no substitute. The nation deserves to see the president in action. Everything else is curated image-building by the White House staff.
A few questions tacked on ritually to the end of joint appearances with foreign heads of state aren’t a substitute. They are Potemkin affairs.
Republicans would love to bear down more on Biden’s age, but dare not. Their frontrunner, Donald Trump, is 77 — only three years younger than Biden; and, at 81, the Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, is showing signs of health challenges linked to age.
Trump’s age is less discussed because his epic legal problems distract from whether he also might be too old.
The sad end of Winston Churchill’s political career should be a warning for all who cling to office too long.
The Conservative Party under Churchill lost the election immediately after World War II but was returned to office in 1951, and Churchill became prime minister for the second time. He was about to turn 77. Health warnings were ignored by his party and by his family.
The infirmities of age got in the way. Churchill was often confused, and new issues baffled him, said his friend the publisher Lord Beaverbrook.
According to historian Roger Scruton, during Churchill’s second administration, the seeds of what would haunt Britain later were sown: He failed to arrest the open border flow of immigrants from the former empire or to check the growth of trade-union power.
When Churchill, retired in 1955, his longtime deputy, Anthony Eden, took over and led the disastrous attempt to seize the Suez Canal in 1956.
Biden’s uncertain future is exacerbated by the seeming shortcomings of Vice President Kamala Harris. Despite attempts to bolster her, such as referring in press releases to the Biden-Harris administration, she is reportedly inept.
She is known to have had difficulty with her staff. In public, she appears frivolous, laughing inappropriately and showing little grasp of issues. She has left no mark on significant assignments handed to her by Biden, including immigration, voting rights and the influence of artificial intelligence.
No wonder a late-August poll from The Wall Street Journal showed 60 percent of eligible voters think that Biden isn’t “mentally up for the job of president.” In a CNN poll, 73 percent of Americans say they are seriously concerned that Biden’s age might negatively affect his current physical- and mental-competence level.
Churchill’s sad political decline shows even great men grow old. Biden can be seen on television going here and there: a blur of travel. But is this a man in hiding from a truth — his age?
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Llewellyn King: Biden needs to recognize the perils of old age
Stained glass window of Methuselah in the southwest transept of Canterbury Cathedral, in Kent, England. He was said in the Bible to have reached the age of 969, making him the oldest person in the Good Book.
Read about The New England Centenarian Study.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
The case for Joe Biden to accept the inevitable dictates of his age and not run again is persuasive. Too much rests on the health and fitness of the president to turn it into a kind of roulette: When will his number come up?
Worse, what if Biden fails mentally and stays in office incognizant of his condition? Being the president of the United States is the most demanding and most responsible job in the world.
Winston Churchill got a second term as prime minister of Great Britain in 1951, and lots of stuff went wrong, from immigration policy to the growth of unchecked union power. History’s greatest prime minister had lost his acuity.
As I am older than Biden, I can say that he should quit. I love to work, but there’s the rub: Not all people and all work are created equally. What I do isn’t critical and doesn’t decide the nation’s future or war and peace.
No one would suggest that an artist toss the easel at a predetermined retirement age. Noel Coward, the great English entertainer, said, “Work is more fun than fun.” That depends on the work.
Age is a complex equation for society, and retirement is a nettlesome problem. France is in revolt over President Emmanuel Macron’s move to raise the retirement age to 64 from 62. Very reasonable, most Americans say.
The issue in France is simple: The French can’t afford huge state pensions any longer. There aren’t enough people at work to pay for those who have retired on their nearly full salaries. You can vote the population rich, but you can’t vote in new, young taxpayers to keep them rich. When the Social Security System falters in the next decade, America may be staring at the same sums as Macron.
Mandatory retirement is a crude way to manage the retirement dilemma. Some workers are genuinely unable to work into their 70s and 80s because their bodies, their minds or both are worn out. Others are at their most productive.
My father’s mind was fine, but he was a mechanic who had done everything from building steel structures to working in mines to repairing cars. His body failed around the age of 6o. He had been doing manual work since he was 13 but at 60 he couldn’t bend, twist, delve, lift, climb, stretch, grab or do many of the myriad things he had done all his life to earn a living. He had to work in a school and then a shop; he loved the school but not the shop. But he had to work. That is what he did: He got up every day and went to work.
He had worked so long and so hard, primarily self-employed, that he hadn’t had time to learn leisure — to play golf, to watch ballgames, to read for recreation, or even to learn how to socialize. That came with work or didn’t happen; friends were people at work.
A friend of mine, a nuclear engineer, reached mandatory retirement age and fell apart, much as my father nearly did. He, too, had no interests outside of his family and work and was lost in the post-job world.
Something of this same problem exists for people leaving the military. Their life is the military, and then, at an early age, there is no more of that life, their life.
When it comes to Biden, things are quite different.
I know the president slightly, and I like him. He loves the job. He has been at or near the peak of power for a long time. When his term ends, on Jan. 20, 2025, he should adjourn to his beach house in Delaware and write his memoirs.
Maybe someone will teach Biden how to play boules, a European form of bowls played by older people in parks. French boules aficionados would be happy to teach him the game. The French have a lot of time in retirement to perfect their play and travel to beach destinations. They would love to bring their skill to Rehoboth Beach, Del. Maybe I should join them.
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
White House Chronicle
InsideSources
David Warsh: Of Biden in '72, Trump now and economic engineering
Reading The Wealth of Nations was a revelation for David Warsh
Calibrate v, trans. to determine the caliber of; spec. to try the bore of a thermometer, or similar instrument, so as to allow in graduating it for any irregularities; to graduate a gauge of any kind with allowance for its irregularities.
Nearly fifty years ago, I showed up as a new employee at the Wilmington (Del.) News-Journal on election night, 1972, the evening that New Castle County Councilor Joe Biden was elected to the U.S. Senate. Biden was 29, I was 28. The second-floor newsroom bubbled with intoxicating excitement and indignation. (President Richard Nixon had carried 49 states). But when Biden was elected president last autumn, I felt as though I had somehow turned the page.
I don’t know whether it was four years of Donald Trump, twelve months of COVID-19, the passage of nearly twenty years since I last worked for a newspaper, or faint memories of New Castle County politics, but a week ago I found the column I was working on, about economics and engineering, more interesting than the prospects of Biden’s presidency. I recognized late in the day that I hadn’t found a way to make it interesting to readers of Economic Principals, my Web site. So I put the topic aside and took a bye. Walking home, I remembered the title of Albert Hirschman’s little book Shifting Involvements: Private Interests and Public Action.
On the other hand, as a copyboy at Chicago’s City News Bureau in 1963, my second assignment had been to cover a Walter Heller press conference at the Palmer House hotel. Heller was then chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. My attendance at the session was perfunctory; the news desk didn’t want a story. But from the Palmer House on, I was looking someplace other than City Hall in which to invest my interests.
That was all the more so after I returned to college to read history of social thought. Just five authors were on the calendar of the sophomore tutorial that year: Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber and Sigmund Freud. That was the year they omitted Adam Smith altogether and his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, perhaps because of the temper of the times (this was 1970-71). When a couple of years after that, in the course of another assignment, I went back to read Smith for myself, it was a revelation. I have been fundamentally interested ever since in the stories we tell (and don’t tell) about economics.
Take that column about economic engineering. I found myself thinking over the last few days not so much about the conclusion of an independent market monitor that the operator of Texas’s power-grid had overcharged residents as much $16 billion during a cold snap last month as about Gov. Greg Abbott’s decision to end the state’s mask mandate and permit businesses to reopen at 100 percent capacity.
The decision to permit the highest legal rates to apply for as much as 32 hours longer than warranted was been reviewed Friday by the Texas Electricity Reliability Council, which declined to reverse the charges, even though the principles would seem to be well-established among specialists. “It’s just nearly impossible to unscramble this sort of egg,” the new chair of the Public Utility Commission said during a commission meeting.
But principles for telling people when and where to wear masks are anything but well-understood and universally agreed-upon. They have something to do with what we call culture. As economist David Kreps said of his 2018 book, The Motivation Toolkit: How to Align Your Employees’ Interests with Your Own: “My colleagues here [at Stanford University and its Graduate School of Business] don’t think this is economics, but it is.” I cannot seem to put that book away.
Economic Principals, says in its flag, “Economic Principals: a weekly column about economics and politics, formerly of The Boston Globe, independent since 2002.” Economic Principals has written frequently about politics for the last five years. Going forward, I hope put the subject mostly on autopilot.
The Trump presidency was accidental. It happened only because so many voters deemed inappropriate a Hillary Rodham Clinton presidency. Trump’s tenure proved to be a turning point, a climax, a crisis that slowly will resolve.
How close he came to re-election! How desperately he fought to hold on to office, even after he lost! The sharpest student of Trump’s career I know, who follows the literature much more widely than I do, believes it was because the now-former president understands that he is facing ruin. Suspicion of money laundering for Russian purchasers of apartments is at the heart of the case.
What I expect to happen is this: the Republican Party will gradually rebuild itself, election by election, as new generations – Gen X (b. 1961-1981) and the Millennials (b. 1982– 2004) take over from the Boomers (b. 1943-1960). The Democratic Party will take advantage of a strong economy and threats posed by the rising great-power competitor that is China to deliver the country into a new era. Congressional elections will be closely fought every two years, but I am guessing that the Democrats may remain in the White House until 2032, though only the Republicans have won the presidency three straight times since Harry Truman.
Meanwhile, I’ll return to engineering and economics next week, and try again to find something interesting to say about blueprints, instruments, and toolkits. Plenty of other columns are already in line. Re-calibration complete!
David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville, Mass.-based economicprincipals.com, where this column first ran.
Llewellyn King: It was a nice inauguration but is Biden wading in too far, too fast?
At the American College of the Building Arts, in Charleston, S.C. It would be good if President Biden addresses income inequality by touting the benefits of education in the trades as opposed to, say, getting degrees in sociology. The trades offer more secure and higher-paying jobs than do the liberal arts.
The college's model is unique in the United States, with its focus on total integration of a liberal arts and science education and the traditional building arts skills. Students choose from among six craft specializations: timber framing, architectural carpentry, plaster, classical architecture, blacksmithing and stone carving.
ACBA's mission is to educate and train artisans in the traditional building arts to foster high craftsmanship and encourage the preservation, enrichment and understanding of the world's architectural heritage through a liberal arts and science education.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
It was a good day. Warm in its content. Soft in its delivery. Kindly in its message. Generous in its intentions. Healing in its purpose.
Trying to implement the soaring hopes of President Joe Biden’s inauguration began immediately. Maybe too immediately, too fast, and with actions that were too sweeping. Biden signed 17 executive orders that suggested an underlying philosophy of “bring it on.”
Biden doesn’t need to open hostilities on all possible fronts at once. He needs to pick his wars and shun some battles. I have a feeling that 17 battles are too many to initiate simultaneously and, possibly, some are going to be lost at a cost.
In his inaugural address, Biden did well in laying out six theaters where his administration will prosecute its wars. But some of those wars will go on for decades – maybe forever.
Big ships take a long time to turn around no matter how many tugboats are engaged. Actions have consequences and so do intentions.
The Biden wars:
The pandemic: This is the war that Biden must win. It is the one into which he needs to pour all his efforts, his own time and talent, and to focus the national mind.
Americans are dying at a horrendous pace. He has promised 100 million vaccine doses in the first 100 days. If that effort falters, for whatever reason, it will stain the Biden presidency. It is job one and transcends everything else.
The environment: It will remain a work in progress. Rejoining the Paris Agreement on Climate Change is a diplomatic and political move, not an environmental one. It will help with the Biden goal of better international standing. It will make many in the environmental movement feel better, but it won’t pull carbon out of the air.
There have been dramatic reductions in the amount of carbon the United States puts into the air since 2005. Biden is in danger of picking up too much of the environmentalists’ old narrative.
The environmental movement can get it very wrong and maybe has again in pushing the world too fast toward wind and solar. These aren’t perfect solutions.
The amount of carbon put into the air by electric generation in the United States is partly due to the hostility toward new dams and particularly toward nuclear power. These were features of the environmental narrative in the 1970s and 1980s.
Simple solutions seldom resolve complex problems. I have a feeling that we are going breakneck with solar and wind; making windmills and solar panels is environmentally challenging, as will be disposing of them after their useful life is over.
Canceling the Keystone XL Pipeline -- after nearly two decades of litigation, diplomatic and environmental review in Canada and the United States -- would seem to be a concession to a constituency rather than sound policy with virtuous effect.
Biden has identified three other theaters where he plans to wage war: growing income inequality, racism, and the attack on truth and democracy.
Income inequality is escalating because new technologies are concentrating wealth, workers have lost their union voice, and our broken schools are turning out broken people, who will start at the bottom and stay there. Racial inequality ditto. Many inner-city schools are that in name more than function.
If there was one big omission from Biden’s agenda of things he is prepared to go to war for, it was education. Most of the social inequalities he listed have an educational aspect. Primary and secondary schools are not turning out students ready for the world of work. Too many universities are social-promoting students who should have been held back in high school.
More are going to college when they should get a practical education in a marketable skill. People with such skills as carpentry, stone cutting, plastering, electrical and iron work are more likely to start their own businesses than those with, say, journalism or sociology degrees.
Biden’s continuing challenge is going to be how to handle the left wing of his party, stirred up by the followers of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They haven’t gone away and are expecting their spoils from the election.
The president’s battle for truth is going to be how we accommodate the new carrier technologies of social media with the need for veracity; how to identify lies without giving into universal censorship. That battle can’t be won until the new dynamics of a technological society are understood.
Go slow and carry a big purpose.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Chris Powell: Beware 'regulatory capture' of appointees to Cabinet
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Many teachers around the country are cheering the forthcoming change in national administration because Betsy DeVos will be replaced as secretary of education. DeVos, an heiress and philanthropist, has been a fan of charter schools and a foe of political correctness. While not really expert in pedagogy, at least she has not been the usual tool of teacher unions.
But President-elect Joe Biden is encouraging teachers to expect Nirvana. Addressing them the other week, Biden noted that his wife, Jill, is a community college teacher, and so "you're going to have one of your own in the White House." Presumably that means that teachers will have "one of their own" at the Education Department as well.
Among those mentioned is U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes, the former Waterbury teacher and 2016 national teacher of the year, a Democrat who was just elected to her second term in Connecticut's 5th Congressional District.
Apart from her classroom work, Hayes has no managerial experience and her first term in Congress was unremarkable. Her recent campaign's television commercials celebrated her merely for listening to her constituents. While she won comfortably enough in a competitive district in a Democratic year, her departure for the Cabinet would prompt a special election that the Democrats might lose even as they already are distressed by the unexpected shrinkage of their majority in the U.S. House.
But then the U.S. Education Department does little to improve education. Mainly it distributes federal money to state and municipal governments, which do the actual educating. No matter who becomes education secretary, money will still get distributed and education won't improve much if at all.
Quite apart from the personalities, the big issue about the appointment of an education secretary is the big issue with other federal department heads. Why should the public cheer the appointment of an education secretary who is part of the interest group he would be regulating, any more than the public should cheer another Treasury secretary coming from a Wall Street investment bank, another labor secretary coming from a labor union, another defense secretary coming from the military or a military contractor, another agriculture secretary coming from agribusiness, and so yforth?
This kind of thing is called "regulatory capture" and it operates under both parties, though some special interests do better under one party than the other, as the cheering from the teacher unions indicates.
xxx
The virus epidemic has invited a comprehensive reconsideration of education but no one in authority has noticed.
Every day brings a change of plan and schedule in Connecticut schools. One day they're open and the next day they are abruptly converted to "remote learning" for a few days, a week or two, or a whole semester because somebody came down with the flu.
Amid all this many students have simply disappeared. Additionally, since education includes not just book learning but the socialization of children, their learning how to behave with others, the education of all children is being badly compromised.
Gov. Ned Lamont wants to leave school scheduling to schools themselves. This lets him avoid responsibility for any school's policy. But local option isn't producing much education.
The hard choice everyone is trying to avoid is between keeping schools open as normal, taking the risk of more virus infections because children are less susceptible to serious cases, or converting entirely to internet schooling and thereby forfeiting education for the missing students and socialization for everyone else.
If social contact can be forfeited, the expense of education can be drastically reduced. The curriculum for each grade can be standardized, recorded, and placed on the internet, with students connecting from home at any time, not just during regular school hours. Tests to evaluate their learning can be standardized too and administered and graded by computer. A corps of teachers can operate a help desk via internet, telephone, or email.
Much would be lost but then much already had been lost even before the epidemic, since social promotion was already the state's main education policy. Maybe the results of completely remote schooling would not be so different from those of social promotion.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.
Don Pesci: Biden and the pride of post-modern cultural Roman Catholics
VERNON, Conn.
Presumptive President-elect Joe Biden has let it be known throughout his half-century-long political career that he is a Kennedy Roman Catholic; in some quarters, Kennedy Catholicism is called cultural Catholicism.
Biden helpfully explained cultural Catholicism to Jack Jenkins, a reporter for Religion News Service (RNS). Hit this link to read it.
In it, Mr. Jenkins writes that “Joe Biden….was shaped by a very American Catholic faith: The way he manages his allegiance to Catholicism gives a glimpse of how Biden will govern as he takes hold of an office he has sought since 1988.’’
The piece lifts several quotes from Biden’s book Promises to Keep: On Life in Politics.
“I’m as much a cultural Catholic as I am a theological Catholic,” Biden wrote. “My idea of self, of family, of community, of the wider world comes straight from my religion. It’s not so much the Bible, the beatitudes, the Ten Commandments, the sacraments, or the prayers I learned. It’s the culture.”
Jenkins offers the following gloss: Cultural Catholicism is “a form of faith that experts," many of them cultural Catholics, "describe as profoundly Catholic in ways that resonate with millions of American believers: It offers solace in moments of anxiety or grief, can be rocked by long periods of spiritual wrestling and is more likely to be influenced by the quiet counsel of women in habits or one’s own conscience than the edicts of men in miters.”
One of the “men in miters” is, of course, the Pope.
John F. Kennedy, a Catholic running for president at a time when anti-Catholicism was still very much a force to be reckoned with – historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Kennedy’s chief biographer, characterized anti-Catholicism as the oldest prejudice in the United States – easily disposed of the notion that he would be the Pope’s cat’s-paw.
A month after Kennedy had met with a group of Protestant pastors, he traveled to Houston and there delivered a speech to a second group of pastors in which he said, “I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope.”
That distinction pretty much doused irrational fears that Kennedy as president would simply be an agent of the Vatican.
Since Kennedy’s day, many Catholics have served their country in various positions with distinction and fidelity both to their church and to the Constitution that they promised on oath to uphold. Catholicism, even the Catholicism of Popes, is not incompatible with patriotism.
Biden, Jenkins makes clear, likes the “culture” of Catholics, nuns and rosary beads, which he carries with him in his pocket. Cultural Catholicism, we are given to understand, is balanced in his thought processes with the theology of his church. The difficulty here is that there are among us cultural Catholics in open warfare against Catholic theology as explicated by the historic Roman Catholic Church, the Popes down through the ages, and leading Catholic clerics.
“Biden’s personal connection to the faith,” Jenkins notes, “remains a highly visible part of his political persona. He carries Rosary beads at all times, fingering it during moments of anxiety or crisis. When facing brain surgery after his short-lived presidential campaign in 1988, he reportedly asked his doctors if he could keep the beads under his pillow. Earlier this year, rival Pete Buttigieg noticed Biden holding Rosary beads backstage before a primary debate.”
Hilaire Belloc – author of the Road to Rome, a close friend of G.K. Chesterton and an unapologetic Catholic – also carried Rosary beads with him. One day, while campaigning for a seat in the British House of Commons, , he was accosted by a lady who shouted out to him from the crowd surrounding his campaign stump that he was a “papist.”
Belloc drew his Rosary beads from his pocket and said to the lady, “Madam, do you see these beads. I pray on them every night before I go to sleep, and every morning when I awake. And, if that offends you, madam, I pray God he will spare me the ignominy of representing you in Parliament.”
Unlike Biden, Belloc's rosary was more than a totem for him; it was the copula that linked him, both theologically and culturally, to the Catholic Church, ancient and modern, rolling through the years from Peter, the Rock against which the gates of Hell shall not prevail, to the sometimes twisted post-paganism of the post-modern 21st Century..
Kennedy’s sword of sundering has two cutting edges. The post-modern cultural Catholic suffers from inordinate pride; he really does think himself not only politically superior to popes, doubtful, but also superior to his church in matters of theology, faith and morals.
Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.
Llewellyn King: The huge unanswered questions of the presidential campaign
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? was the title of a 1963 book by Jimmy Breslin about the disastrous first year of the New York Mets, an expansion team. It’s attributed to the team’s manager Casey Stengel.
As I’ve watched this picaresque presidential election year unfold, I’ve had the same thought.
The game is governance; the campaign, the run-up. And nobody seems to know how to play this game. The questions that should’ve been raised and answered were neither raised nor answered.
Some unheard and unanswered questions:
· How will you rebuild our stature abroad, restore America to global leadership and moral authority?
· What will you do if the pandemic hangs on for years? How will you place the millions whose jobs were lost through the pandemic in work?
· How will you fix our ailing school system with its disastrous weaknesses exposed by Covid-19?
· The health-care system is stretched to breaking under the pandemic with or without Obamacare. What is your plan?
· If the climate change-induced sea level rise accelerates, how will you deal with cities that appear in danger, including New York, Boston, New Orleans, and San Francisco?
· One of the rationales for the U.S.-Mexico border wall was to reduce the influx of drugs. Now, with the advent of drones, we may have a new drug-smuggling crisis. What is your plan to combat it?
· States depend on gasoline and cigarette taxes, but electric vehicles are pushing out gasoline taxes and cigarette smoking is in steep decline. How do you see these tax streams being replaced?
· What will you do if China invades Taiwan?
· What will you do if China bars U.S. shipping from traversing the South China Sea?
· The population of Africa is set to double every quarter century. Already there is vert high unemployment, what should the United States do to help?
· Jobs are being eaten up by AI and other technologies. While those enthralled with these job-subtracting technologies point to the history of the Industrial Revolution, this may be different. What should be done?
Just think of anything to do with the future and a gusher of questions erupts, but no answers have been heard, or few at best.
President Trump, it seems, will offer us more government as demolition derby, but wilder than in the first four years. We’ve gotten a shower of hopes, fanciful and improbable. When it comes to the overhanging crisis of today, the pandemic, he is like King Canute commanding the waves to retreat.
From his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, we are to get what? Decency, character? Like all candidates, he’s told us he’ll fix everything. But how remains obscured from us, and quite possibly from himself.
On the evening of April 7, 1775, Samuel Johnson, the sage and lexicographer, told us that patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel. That is a truth that Trump -- who probably doesn’t know who Johnson was -- has exploited as his own. He would undo the things we should be proud of in the world, like human rights, and get away with it because he wraps himself in the flag like Linus in his blanket.
Those who’ll vote for Biden will vote for a man who is old in years and old in ideas. If he wins, his supporters can trade fear for apprehension.
As we face the most momentous challenges the world has ever borne -- international upheaval, a lingering pandemic and climate change – we’ve gone through a presidential campaign where the issues were shelved for repetitive nothingness. We haven’t been lifted by high rhetoric nor inspired by blinding vision.
The global upheaval triggered by disease, nation realignment and technology will have to await the judgment of those who whisper into the ears of presidents, when they, the candidates, have none, as now.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Web site: whchronicle.com
Llewellyn King: Lessons and unknowns in the COVID-19 crisis so far
— Photo by Thomas Jantzen/SPÖ
Snapshots. That’s what we have of the United States as we emerge tentative and fraught from lockdown.
We don’t have the whole picture, just snapshots of this and that.
Some of the snapshots are encouraging: The air is clearer, crime is down and a collective spirit is apparent in many places.
Others are more disturbing: The pandemic has become politicized.
Those to the right are demanding a total reopening of the economy; they’re abandoning masks and social distancing. And they’re using fragments of information to justify their cavalier attitude toward the great human catastrophe: They insist the government can’t tell them what to do, even if it endangers countless others.
The mainstream, meanwhile, reflects a cautious approach of phased-in reopening of the economy, masks, social distancing and sanitization.
Snapshot: People of middle age and older are conspicuously more cautious than the young.
Snapshot: Caution has no coherent spokesperson, unless you count New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
Where, one wonders, is Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee to challenge President Trump in the 2020 race? He has, one reads, held dozens of election events, but his voice hasn’t been heard. (Can the liberal press be held accountable? Hardly.) Biden snapshot: a distant figure, out-of-focus.
Every time I catch a Biden speech, he’s talking about his family, his Pennsylvania roots, or the tragic loss of his son Beau to cancer. He hasn’t found the words that give strength to a distraught and suffering people.
If Biden has great ideas about the future, about how we will emerge from this terrible time, they haven’t been heard. Maybe he should hire a speechwriter; plenty of good newspaper people out of work.
Snapshot: A new federalism, as espoused by Trump: If it goes right, it’s my achievement. If it goes wrong, the governors are to blame: The buck never stops here.
More Trump snapshots: Obama is to blame; Mueller is to blame; China is to blame; inspectors general are to blame; villains at every turn.
Snapshot: Immigrants are heroes at the top and the bottom.
Every other doctor interviewed on television for their expertise about the pandemic, it seems, has an accent: That shows the power of immigrants in science. Immigrants also carry the load in the most dangerous job in the United States: meat processing and packing. It is high-risk, low-pay work.
The immigrant effect is encompassing and a source of value to all Americans.
Snapshot of health care: A system unequal to the job.
There are overworked and under-supplied healthcare workers, plus many patients who won’t be able to pay their hospital bills. Wait until the invoices start arriving across the country, spreading destitution. If the Supreme Court rules against Obamacare, the destitution will be complete: a black, financial hole swallowing millions of Americans.
Snapshot: The poor are poorly. Hispanics and African Americans are bearing the brunt of the financial pain, and a disproportionate number of infections. Because so many are on the lower rungs of the employment ladder, they’re completely out of money now, and may find they have no jobs to return to as restrictions lift. This may be the ugliest snapshot in the gallery.
Saddest snapshot: Americans lined up in the tens of thousands to get a handout from the food banks. Mostly, one sees long lines of cars waiting for bags of food. Those are the lucky ones: They have cars. The needy must walk.
Happiest snapshot: Science is back, despite the Trump administration’s attempts to hobble it.
The public wants medicines for many conditions, and the rush to find answers for COVID-19 will lead to many discoveries that will benefit other sufferers with other diseases. War spurs innovation, and that’s what we’re getting.
Hard-to-read snapshot: How many companies will survive? Will we have just one national airline? Fewer utility companies? Will retail and office space be on the market for decades? How many people will work from home full time going forward? A boom in self-employment, leading to many startups and innovations galore?
Interesting snapshot: Will the impressive governors and mayors who have emerged during the pandemic save us from the political mediocrity that characterizes the national scene? Check out Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) and Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms (D).
Keep snapping and wearing a mask, things will come into focus: good and bad.
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Don Pesci: Is Blumental holding off Biden endorsement on principle?
Sen. Richard Blumenthal
VERNON, Conn.
As of April 28, U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut Democrat, has not yet endorsed his party’s likely presidential nominee, Joe Biden. Blumenthal’s continued non-endorsement cannot be the result of an oversight. Most prominent Democrats, even those engaged in the Democratic primary – including Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Vermont socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders – have offered their endorsements. Former President Obama, after a little hectoring from bigwigs in his own party, has issued a late but fulsome endorsement.
No one seems to know for certain what may be holding up the Blumenthal endorsement, but theories are making the rounds.
May 11 will mark the one year anniversary of the publication of a piece that appeared in the New York Post titled “The troubling reason why Biden is so soft on China” written by investigative journalist Peter Schweizer, the author of “Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends.” Some are nursing the theory that Blumenthal may have speed-read the piece and, a man of conscience, it disturbed his political equipoise.
How could any self-respecting Democrat endorse as president and the nominal head of the Democratic Party a politician who is “soft on China,” particularly now when China is importing stolen, proprietary data from companies in the United States that supply military equipment to the arsenal of democracy while exporting Coronavirus to the Western world?
Schweizer believes that the all but certain presidential nominee of the Democratic Party may be soft on China in part because China may have purchased his affections by providing money and golden opportunities to his son, Hunter Biden. The devil, we are told, is in the details. In the Schweizer piece the Devil’s details are hauled out of the shadows.
“In 2013,” Schweizer writes, “then-Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden flew aboard Air Force Two to China. Less than two weeks later, Hunter Biden’s firm inked a $1 billion private equity deal with a subsidiary of the Chinese government’s Bank of China. The deal was later expanded to $1.5 billion. In short, the Chinese government funded a business that it co-owned along with the son of a sitting vice president.”
The Post piece dots all its “i’s” and crosses all its “t’s” with a superfluity of details. It is, as we sometimes say in the business, convincing – absent an equally convincing response from Biden.
One of the Devil’s details cited by Schweizer stands out like a sore thumb. “Hunter Biden’s father, the vice president, met with Chinese President Hu Jintao in Washington as part of the Nuclear Security Summit,” Schweizer writes. Twelve days after Hunter Biden “stepped off Air Force Two in Beijing, his company [Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC] signed a historic deal with the Bank of China, the state-owned financial behemoth often used as a tool of the Chinese government. The Bank of China had created a first-of-its-kind investment fund called Bohai Harvest RST (BHR). According to BHR, one of its founding partners was none other than Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC.”
Rosemont, the Biden-Archer firm, became “increasingly involved with China. Devon Archer became the vice chairman of Bohai Harvest (BHR), helping [to] oversee some of the fund’s investments…. In December 2014, BHR became an ‘anchor investor’ in the IPO of China General Nuclear Power Corp. (CGN), a state-owned energy company involved in the construction of nuclear reactors. In April 2016, the U.S. Justice Department would charge CGN with stealing nuclear secrets from the United States — actions prosecutors said could cause ‘significant damage to our national security.’”
Asked what he knew and when he knew it concerning the China/Hunter Biden connections detailed by Schweizer, Joe Biden implausibly claimed he and his son never discussed Hunter Biden’s business relations. The Schweizer piece, some note, will have been in the public stream for a year in May and yet has not proven an obstacle to Biden’s march to the White House. None of the details were discussed during the sometimes contentious Democrat Primary, and the media has devoted little attention to it.
Why should we not suppose it is a dead letter – old news?That is always possible, but not likely in mano a mano debates between President Trump – who, whatever his failings, knows how to make news – and Biden who, most will acknowledge, is not William Jennings Bryant on the stump.
However, the question immediately before the house is: Why has Blumenthal not yet endorsed Biden? The answer to that question most flattering to Blumenthal may be: Perhaps Blumenthal is a man of strong ethical principles after all. Given the Schweizer analysis, which has not been disputed by Biden or Blumenthal, how it is possible to maintain a view that Trump is too cozy with China, roughly Blumenthal’s position, while extending a hearty endorsement of Biden, whose son Hunter has been woven into the Chinese tapestry in a fashion some might consider compromising?
Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.
Shefali Luthra: Do 160 million people 'like' their health care? Kind of
Articulating his proposal for health-care reform, former Vice President Joe Biden emphasized the number of Americans who, he said, were more than perfectly satisfied with the coverage they have.
“One hundred sixty million people like their private insurance,” Biden said during the November Democratic presidential primary debate.
That argument is at the heart of many moderate Democrats’ criticism of the “Medicare for All” proposal backed by two presidential candidates from New England — Senators Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). We decided to take a closer look.
We reached out to the Biden campaign for comment. The campaign directed us to his next point — that people who don’t like their private coverage could, under his health plan, opt into government-sponsored coverage.
160 Million, And Some Squishy Polling
The figure appears to refer to the number of Americans who receive health benefits through work — so-called employer-sponsored health insurance. Under Medicare for All that would no longer be an option.
On first blush, polling seems to suggest that most people with employer-sponsored coverage like it.
Polling done earlier this year by the Kaiser Family Foundation with the Los Angeles Times found that most beneficiaries are “generally satisfied” with this insurance. (Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the foundation.)
But that doesn’t get at the whole story.
“Most like their policy, but not all,” said Robert Blendon, a health-care pollster at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
The context matters.
In the same KFF/L.A. Times poll, about 40% of people with employer-sponsored coverage said they had trouble paying medical bills, out-of-pocket costs or premiums. About half indicated going without or delaying health care because — even with this coverage — it was unaffordable. And about 17% reported making “difficult sacrifices” to pay for health care.
Beneficiaries who have higher-deductible plans — that is, they are required to pay larger sums of out-of-pocket before health coverage kicks in — are also less likely to be happy with their coverage, and more likely to report problems paying for health care.
And it’s also worth noting that these high-deductible plans have grown increasingly common, even for the 160 million Americans who get insurance from work, though that trend may now be losing steam. Research from the Commonwealth Fund, meanwhile, notes that increasing numbers of “underinsured” people do, in fact, have employer-sponsored health insurance. Underinsured people are those who have coverage but delay care because they still can’t afford it.
Meanwhile, other polling, such as a January Gallup survey, suggests that about 7 in 10 Americans believe the nation’s health-care system is in crisis.
So while Americans may individually not express frustration with their specific private plans, more are learning that, when they try to use that coverage, it doesn’t meet their health needs..
These findings cast significant shade on the idea that all 160 million Americans with employer-sponsored coverage actually like it.
Biden argued that “160 million people like their private insurance.”
A cursory look at polling would suggest that most of the people he’s talking about — Americans who get coverage through work — are happy with their plans.
But once you dig a little deeper, that narrative gets more complicated. Even while Americans say they like their plans, large proportions indicate that the private coverage they have still leaves meaningful gaps, requiring them to skip or delay health care because they cannot afford it.
Biden’s argument is technically correct, but it leaves out important context and relies on a somewhat squishy number. We rate it Half True.
Shefali Luthra is a reporter for Kaiser Health News.
Shefali Luthra: ShefaliL@kff.org, @Shefalil
Llewellyn King: A big Warren weakness -- she always takes the bait
Sen. Elizabeth Warren
The Democratic deep state – it is not made up of Democrats in the bureaucracies, but rather those who make up the core of the party -- is in agony.
Solid, middle-of-the-road, fad-proof Democrats are not happy. They are the ones most likely to have thrown their support early to Joe Biden, and who now are eyeing Elizabeth Warren with apprehension and a sense of the inevitable.
Warren exhibits all the weaknesses of someone who, at her core, is not a professional politician. She blunders into traps whether they are set for her or not. She is vulnerable to the political equivalent of fatal attraction.
Biden lurches from gaffe to gaffe and is haunted by the positions he took a long time ago. Some of his social positions turn out to be like asbestos: decades ago, seen as a cure-all building material, now lethal.
Where Biden stumbles over the issues of the past, Warren walks into the traps of today. She is one of those self-harming politicians who shoots before she takes aim.
When Donald Trump mocked her claims of Native American ancestry, Warren took the bait and ended with a hook in her gullet. A more seasoned politician would not have been goaded by a street fighter into taking a DNA test, resulting in an apology. Ignorance met incaution and Trump won.
Warren also swallowed the impeachment bait of the left, ignoring the caution of centrists who worried about the outcome in an election year. If the Senate acquits, Trump claims exoneration.
Then there is the Medicare for All trap into which Warren not so much fell as she propelled herself. Because Bernie Sanders, who reminds me of King Lear, and his field commander Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others on the left favored it, Warren had to leap in, ill-prepared.
The prima facie logic is there, but the mechanism is not. It is easy to see that Medicare is a very popular program that works. It is also easy to see that the United States pays more than twice as much on health care as any other nation.
Those, like myself, who have experienced state systems abroad, as well a Medicare at home, know the virtues of the single-payer system with patient-chosen, private insurance on the top for private hospital rooms, elective surgery and pampering that is not basic medicine. But we also know that the switch to Medicare for All would be hugely dislocating.
Employer-paid health care is a tax on business but substituting that with a straight tax is politically challenging, structurally difficult, and impossible to sell at this stage in the evolution of health care. It likely will give a new Democratic president a constitutional hernia.
Warren seems determined to embrace the one thing that makes the left and its ideas electorally vulnerable: The left wants to tell the electorate what it is going to take away.
Consider this short list of the left’s confiscations which the centrists must negotiate, not endorse: We want your guns, we want your employer-paid health care, we want your gasoline-powered car, and we want the traditional source of your electricity. Trust us, you will love these confiscations.
Those are the position traps for Warren. To make a political sale -- or any sale – do not tell the customers what you are going to take away from them.
It is well known that Republicans roll their eyes in private at the mention of Trump, while supporting him in public. Democratic centrists -- that place where the true soul of a party resides, where its expertise dwells, and where its most thoughtful counsel is to be heard -- roll their eyes at the mention of all the leading candidates. They like Pete Buttigieg but think him unelectable. If elected, they worry that Warren would fall into the traps set for her around the world -- as Trump has with Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un.
Politics needs passion. “She is better than Trump,” is not a passionate rallying cry.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Linda Gasparello
Co-host and Producer
"White House Chronicle" on PBS
Mobile: (202) 441-2703
Website: whchronicle.com
David Warsh: U.S. foreign policy and the hell of good intentions
The Unisphere, in the New York city borough of Queens.
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
The single hardest thing to understand about Donald Trump is that his dominating foreign-policy concerns are probably shared by a substantial majority of Americans, though not in any detail. Two of these matters are trade and immigration policies, but more fundamental than either is America’s overall posture vis-a-vis China and Russia – its “grand strategy.” The quintessential Manhattan real estate dodger turned television personality turns out to have a pretty good feel for American politics.
Two new books that seek to make sense of Trump’s victory have appeared recently: The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (Yale, 2018), by John Mearsheimer; and The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), by Stephen Walt. So far, they have been thoroughly ignored. A third book, similarly oriented, by Andrew Bacevich, No Solid Ground: America after the Cold War (Metropolitan) will appear next year.
There is not a great deal of difference between Walt’s and Mearsheimer’s basic views of American foreign policy. This is unsurprising, since the two collaborated on The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, a book published in 2007 after several years of controversy in the making. Then their target was what they considered the disproportionate influence on American foreign policy of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which had been a forceful enthusiast of the war in Iraq. This time their target is the foreign policy community in general.
But instead of trying to make sense of the views of the current occupant of the White House – Walt writes, “[Trump] lacked the acumen, discipline and political support to pull off a judicious revision of U.S. foreign policy, and his inept handling of these issues has undermined US influence without diminishing America’s burdens” – they zero in from different angles on the period between 1993 and 2017, when the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations, each in control of foreign policy for eight years, pursued a policy that the authors call “liberal hegemony.”
These were the years of “the end of history” and “the unipolar moment,” when, boasting of having won the Cold War, the U.S. sought to spread its own values around the world. Balance-of-power considerations that had animated US foreign policy for the previous 50 years were put aside. Invasions, humanitarian interventions, and regime change became new instruments of policy. The result, the authors argue, were seven wars, a depleted treasury, a run-down military, and, most of all, diminished US influence around the world.
Mearsheimer, of the University of Chicago, is a political theorist, and his book is more thorough and austere, with a good deal of attention paid to philosophical matters and the history and logic of nation-states. He makes a closely reasoned case for the virtues of restraint.
Walt, of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, is a scrapper. The Hell of Good Intentions is a manifesto for what he calls “off-shore balancing.” Give up on trying to remake the world in America’s image, he advocates; concentrate instead on maintaining a balance of power in three key regions in the Northern hemisphere: Europe, East Asia, and the Persian Gulf.
Two outsiders have tried and failed to reorient foreign policy along these lines, Walt says – first Obama, now Trump. Why has it been so difficult to change course? Political leadership has something to do with it: Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. Looking beyond political parties, Walt says, is an amorphous foreign- policy establishment consisting of Foreign Service professionals, multinational corporations, foundations, associations of various sorts, think tanks, and journalists specializing in foreign affairs. Ben Rhodes, who served as Obama’s deputy national security adviser, called it “the Blob.” In Because They Could I called it “the Generation of ’91.”
Walt writes: “The foreig- policy establishment will not embrace a strategy that would diminish its own power, status, and sense of self-worth.” And indeed, after 25 years, the hegemony of the liberal hegemonists is pretty complete. As Walt points out, as of 2017, the only editorial columnists at major U.S. newspapers who espouse non-interventionist views of U.S. foreign- policy were Steve Chapman, of the Chicago Tribune, and Stephen Kinzer, of The Boston Globe.
“[I]nstead of being a disciplined body of professionals constrained by a well-informed public and forced by necessity to set priorities and hold themselves accountable, today’s foreign policy elite is a dysfunctional caste of privileged insiders who are frequently disdainful of alternative perspectives and insulated both professionally and personally from the consequences of the policies they promote.’’
How to change the current mindset? Walt says the only way to broaden public debate is to “create a countervailing set of organizations and institutions that can do battle in the marketplace of ideas…. Needless to say,” he continues, “this effort will require significant financial resources drawn from Americans who worry that continuing to pursue liberal hegemony will do serious long-term damage to the United States.”
So it’s not without interest that both Mearsheimer and Walt have been supported by the Charles Koch Foundation, that arch-bugaboo of the liberal establishment. But no one who has read Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts (2009), by David Engerman, will doubt that America’s foreign-policy establishment needs rebuilding from the ground up. In this respect, strength to at least one arm of the Koch brothers’ political activities, the Charles Koch Institute.
My hunch is that a Post-Trump Generation will take over sometime in the next six years, and gradually remake U.S. politics. The foreign-policy establishment will follow. “Offshore balancing,” after all, is just a new name for an old doctrine — what, in an earlier age, was known as foreign policy realism. Devised through trial and error by Democrat Harry Truman in the early years of the Cold War, it became the animating principle of Republican presidents from Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.
Could a return to realism come from the Republican Party? Perhaps, though current GOP leadership seems to have been pretty thoroughly hollowed out by its obsequiousness to Trump. A young Democratic Party candidate could campaign successfully on a program of offshore-balancing – but grooming such a candidate takes time. Those interested in defeating Donald Trump in 2020 should consider compromising on Joe Biden, especially if he pledges to serve a single term.
Only a candidate who understood himself to be more a stop-gap than a standard-bearer would make such a pledge, forfeiting an enormous amount of leverage. But Biden is old and wise enough to remember the immense service President Gerald Ford performed in similarly tumultuous circumstances nearly 50 years ago.
David Warsh, an economic historian and long-time columnist, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this piece first appeared.
Biden is too old to run for president
From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com
Joe Biden is apparently thinking of running for president again in 2020. The former vice president is a popular and charming guy (I interviewed him a few times many years ago when I worked in Delaware, which he then served in Congress), knows policy issues well, is a good if too talkative speaker and represents the sort of policy positions (New Deal redux) that could be a winner in that year’s election against Trump (if he’s still in office, which I now doubt) or another Republican.
But Biden would be 77 then – too old! While you can be that elderly and still be in sound mental and physical health, the chances are much, much greater that your health will quickly fall apart (think stroke) than for, say, a 60-year-old. Or the decline could be more subtle, e.g. --Ronald Reagan was in his late seventies in his second term and displayed signs of cognitive decline. Luckily for the nation, Reagan had very good people around him to help.
We all need to know when to step back and let younger people make a mess of things.
Llewellyn King: In search of the real Elizabeth Warren
I went to Boston last week in pursuit of the real Elizabeth Warren. You see, I don’t think that the whole story of Warren comes across on television, where she can seem overstated, too passionate about everyday things to be taken seriously.
Like others, I've wondered why the progressives are so enamored of the Massachusetts senator. Suffolk University (in Boston), mostly known for its authoritative polls, gave her platform as part of an ongoing series of public events in conjunction with The Boston Globe. But whether the dearest hopes of the progressives will be fulfilled, or whether the senior senator from Massachusetts has reached her political apogee is unclear.
What I did find is that Warren has star power. She is a natural at the podium, and revels in it. At least she did at Suffolk, where the cognoscenti came out to roar their affirmation every time that she threw them some red meat, which she did often.
Here's a sampling:
On student loans: “The U.S. government is charging too much interest on student loans. It shouldn’t be making money on the backs of students.”
On the U.S. Senate: “It was rigged and is rigged [by lobbyists and money in politics]. The wind only blows in one direction in Washington ... to make sure that the rich have power and remain in power.”
Warren's questioner, Globe political reporter Joshua Miller, led her through the predictable obstacle course of whether she was angling to be the vice-presidential candidate if Joe Biden runs and becomes the Democratic nominee. She waffled this question, as one expected, admitting to long talks about policy with Biden and declaring herself prepared to talk policy with anyone. She said the subject of the vice presidency might have come up.
Short answer, in my interpretation: She would join the ticket in a heartbeat. This is not only for reasons of ambition -- of which she has demonstrated plenty, from her odyssey through law schools, until she found a perch at Harvard as a full professor -- but also age.
Warren is 66 and although her demeanor and appearance are of a much younger woman, the math is awkward. There are those in the Democratic Party who say that she needs a full term in the Senate to get some legislative experience and to fulfill the commitment of her first elected office. But eight years from now, she'll probably be judged as too old to run for president.
Clearly, Warren didn't fancy the punishment and probable futility of a run against Hillary Clinton. But the vice presidency might suit her extraordinarily well, given Biden’s age of 72.
Warren has stage presence; she fills a room. She is funny, notwithstanding that you can be too witty in nation politics, as with failed presidential aspirants Morris Udall and Bob Dole. She reminds me of those relentlessly upbeat mothers, who were always on-call to fix things in the children’s books of my youth.
Although Warren comes from a working-class background, years of success at the best schools has left her with patina of someone from the comfortable classes -- someone for whom things work out in life. She counters this by stressing the plight of the middle class, the decline in real wages and her passion for fast food and beer -- light beer, of course.
Warren's father was janitor in Oklahoma who suffered from heart disease and her mother worked for the Sears catalog. The young Elizabeth did her bit for the family income by waitressing.
However, it's hard to imagine her at home at a union fish fry. My feeling is that she'd be more comfortable -- the life of the party, in fact -- at a yacht club.
Progressives yearn for Warren and she speaks to their issues: lack of Wall Street regulation, and federal medical-research dollars, and the need for gun control, student-loan reform, equal pay for equal work, and government contracting reform.
She is a classic, untrammeled liberal who is less dour than Bernie Sanders, and less extreme. So it's no wonder that so many Democrats long for her to occupy the presidency or the vice presidency.
All in all, I'd like to go to a party where she is the host: the kind where they serve more than light beer.
Llewellyn King (lking@kingpublishing.com) is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS.
"White House Chronicle" on PBS