Maureen Dowd brings it all back

Once in a while, without a hand from outside "fact-checkers" or partisan "attack machines," the best journalists in the mainstream media light up the sky and show us what is at stake.

With one column, and its ghastly aftermath, Maureen Dowd reintroduces us to the people Mitt Romney would bring back to the White House—the warrior intellectuals of the Bush years. Her New York Times column Neocons Slither Back, and the next morning’s Politico summary of their outraged responses, should be read together.

Alone, Dowd’s column is merely a workmanlike reminder that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan rely on the same neocons George Bush used to intellectualize about shaping events around the world with US armed forces. It contained two rather unoriginal insults: suggesting that Paul Ryan relies on the words of his campaign manager, Dan Senor, a right-wing flack with a world view, and repeating Paul Wolfowitz’s concern that Obama should not be allowed to “slither” back into office without a clear position on Libya.

By next morning, five neocons were already on record accusing the outrageous Maureen Dowd of being a creepy, hate-mongering, and lazy peddler of anti-Semitic imagery. Apparently "slither" has Jewish copyright. It can be used by Jewish American hawks when questioning the "moral clarity" of a Kenyan-friendly president, but can’t even be repeated by an insolent Catholic feminist in the New York Times.

The accusation that Dowd was reviving a vile ancient stereotype about doltish gentile politicians being manipulated by “clever and snake-like Jews” is laughably self- aggrandizing, ineffectual, and uncivil. It tells us, however, that the neocons have lost none of their edge, that their menace is as fresh as a fall north wind.

Maureen Dowd is too smart to think and too good a writer to imply that Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and George Bush were stupid, innocent puppets of the neocons. She was simply reminding us that the staff a president assembles reflects on the character of the president, and doesn’t diminish his power.

This incident, however, does say quite a lot about the caliber of the public intellectuals Romney and Ryan are presently indulging. They misjudged the Middle East over the last decade and misjudge their detractors at home today.

Accusing someone of being anti-Semitic is going nuclear. It’s the polemist’s application of “shock and awe.” It’s designed to cower weaklings. Dowd, however, is still at it.

Rice and Noonan’s brush with perfection

There’s a grace that seems to descend on intelligent women who’ve worked for Republican presidents. Condoleezza Rice was at George Bush’s side through each of his Middle East adventures, and Peggy Noonan wrote speeches for the sunny side of the Ronald Reagan presidency. Both are listened to respectfully, whether they abandon their critical faculties or not.

Here’s the conclusion of Rice’s speech to the Republicans in Tampa—a speech that many judged as the finest and wisest of the convention:

“Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have the experience and the integrity and the vision to lead us – they know who we are, what we want to be and what we offer the world.

That is why this is a moment – an election – of consequence. Because it just has to be – that the most compassionate and freest country on the face of the earth – will continue to be the most powerful!”

Here’s Peggy Noonan in her blog for the Wall St. Journal today, outlining what state of mind Mitt Romney should take to his first debate with Barack Obama:

“What Mitt Romney has to show is command, talent, resolve. He has to move with firmness, strength. Americans don’t really want someone they’d like to go out and have a beer with, they want someone who can help them afford a beer. First things first. Romney at this point should just forget likability—let’s just say he’s likable enough. He needs people to see certainty, guts, ability, and heft. Americans are tired of trying to like these guys, they want to respect them. They’d like to feel honest awe.”

Can you imagine Pat Buchanan or Dick Cheney imagining, let alone getting away with such complacent, romantic nonsense?

A black conservative academic may want America to be more compassionate, and any speechwriter for any president will want her words to suspend our disbelief and leave us in a state of awe. However, Rice and Noonan shouldn’t be able to utter such sugary platitudes about who Americans are and what Americans want in a president without being laughed at.

Maybe, it was only an awkward fleeting period in the emancipation of smart women. Let’s hope, however, that the next generation of powerful women who ride in the back seat with future presidents don’t come out of the experience as hero-worshippers and shameless flatterers.

Paul Ryan: take him very seriously, seriously!

Although Paul Ryan’s nomination was bold news on Saturday, there won’t be any of the drama that Sarah Palin generated four years ago. Sole shareholder Mitt Romney will have no trouble running the whole show. Idealistic, high-spirited Paul Ryan has been managed by his Republican elders ever since he left college.

Laid-back George W. Bush certainly didn’t have any problem running a White House full of political and campaign “giants.” Apparently, for eight years, Bush delighted in calling Vice President Dick Cheney “Big Time.” Advisor Karl Rove, the strategist that billionaires still believe walks on water, answered to the nicknames “Boy Genius” or “Turd Blossom.”

It’s too early to guess what will stick to Paul Ryan. Sooner or later, however, he’ll get tagged with a nickname more telling than “policy wonk” and less confusing than “young Republican intellectual.”

Just because he has a shallow sense of humor doesn’t mean Romney—and the rest of us—need to take Paul Ryan entirely seriously.

Isn’t there something wonderfully funny about this observation by Ryan’s New Yorker biographer Ryan Lizza about his 2010 “Road Map” fiscal plan?

“The document’s introduction referred to the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, Hayek, Friedman, Adam Smith, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, John Locke, Alexis de Tocqueville, Georges-Eugène Sorel, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Charles Murray, and Niall Ferguson. Ryan himself seemed intent on entering the canon. ‘Only by taking responsibility for oneself, to the greatest extent possible, can one ever be free,' he wrote, ‘and only a free person can make responsible choices—between right and wrong, saving and spending, giving or taking.’’’

Click on: www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/08/06/120806fa_fact_lizza#ixzz23L95useh

Without mentioning Russia’s Ayn Rand, his boyhood crush, he drops the names of nine European intellectuals in a document designed to stop Barack Obama turning America into another European moral and economic swamp.

Young Congressman Ryan insists that to be free, one must take “responsibility for oneself, to the greatest extent possible.” In his cramped world, however, he’s had to make his way—and find his space—within his family business, within his family compound, with his family contacts, within the family’s politics, and in his family’s faith.

He must have read Atlas Shrugged secretly in his bedroom, with a flashlight.

Clearly, he’s exactly the kind of existential free-wheeler that family man Mitt Romney needn’t worry about.

Ryan may make Republican economics a self-defeating election issue. But neither one of them, nor the Romney-Ryan ticket, will capture the fascination Americans still have with Barack Obama.

A pragmatist’s ticket: Barack Obama and Lawrence Summers

If presidential elections were conceived to realize the ideals of bloggers as well as billionaires, my nomination for the ideal ticket for our times would be the re-election of Barack Obama and the return of his principle economic advisor Lawrence Summers as his Vice-President.

Summers is as lovable and definitely as smart as Dick Cheney—and clearly the only serious conservative of the two. Unfortunately, both Summers and Obama spent time in Harvard and Washington; Republicans, libertarians, and political refugees in Canada could make something of that for a while.

Yet, they balance each other in striking ways. Obama speaks softly and Summers looks like Teddy Roosevelt’s big stick. Obama is serving a tumultuous first term and Summers is enjoying a sabbatical. Summers is the heavyweight on everything suburban that Mitt Romney thinks Barack Obama is light on.

Obama may turn out in the history books to be the most level-headed conservative president since Dwight Eisenhower. But that can’t be accepted in real time—he’s not white, wide, rich, or old enough.

These are dangerous, ambiguous times—replete with circumstances that weak individuals in politics can’t acknowledge. They’re the ones who ask Americans to feel sure about the future by drawing red lines on maps on other continents and who promise constitutional amendments to balance the national budget. As if ultimatums and constitutions can excuse leaders from using their heads when the facts change and new decisions are required.

On the other hand, Obama and Summers use words like “flexibility” and “contingency” when thinking about how to address future responsibilities. Here’s Summers in the Financial Times writing on how to get to sustainable growth:

"The right approach is to use contingent commitments – policies that commit to action to normalize conditions, but only when certain thresholds are crossed. So, for example, it might be appropriate for the Federal Reserve to commit to maintain the current Fed Funds rate until some threshold with respect to unemployment or expected inflation is crossed. Commitments to fund infrastructure over many years might include a commitment that a financing mechanism such as a gasoline tax would be triggered when some level of employment or output growth has been achieved for a given interval. Tax reform legislation might propose that new rates be phased in at a pace that would depend on economic performance.”

Click on: www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/52818152-74d8-11e1-ab8b-00144feab49a.html#axzz1qJwOYXFg

This is not sexy stuff for the campaign trail. At the same time, Obama is being scolded by Mitt Romney for using the word “flexibility” in characterizing future talks on nuclear arms cooperation with Russia.

My ticket’s use of words like flexibility, contingency, and other qualifiers will need millions of marketing dollars to compete against the Hollywood masculine rhetoric of the likely alternative. However, their approach, over time, just might leave a rather compelling impression of two individuals determined to apply careful thought to the work of serving America’s interests.