Chalmers Johnson

An American Critic Chalmers Johnson, who died recently at age 79 in California, may be among the most influential foreign policy thinkers since George Kennan and too few people outside of the academy knew his name. Johnson, an Asian scholar, was one of the first to understand and reinterpret the economic strength of Japan and China and, after spending his early life as a CIA consultant and a hawk on foreign policy, he transformed his thinking into insightful analysis of what he saw as the imperialist tendencies of the United States. Johnson repeatedly asked a simple question that American policy makers rarely confront. Why is it that since the end of the Cold War, American defense spending has continued to escalate at a remarkable rate and why do we need more than 700 military installations in every corner of the world? Good question. Johnson argued in a 2007 NPR interview and in his book Nemesis that America's vast military complex, the cost to maintain it and the power it invested in the presidency was a fundamental danger to American democracy. Johnson was in the tradition of great scholar/writers and politicians who were also foreign policy thinkers. He attempted in a careful, thoughtful way to place the American experience in the world in the context of history. He was not blinded, as so many political leaders are today, by the notion that America's role in the world is somehow pre-ordained. The Romans and the British were forced, eventually, to come to grips with their lack of "exceptionalism" and that empire was a costly, ultimately futile (and fatal) exercise. The same fate may await the United States. Chalmers Johnson argued that American democracy is the only aspect of our story that is truly exceptional and with so much attention devoted to American empire we are in danger of squandering the very thing that makes us great.

Happy Thanksgiving

Lincoln's Decree of Thanksgiving in 1863 It is well to remember that as troubled as our economy is at this traditional season of Thanksgiving, there have been darker times. During the awful year of 1863, with a vast and bloody civil war raging across the nation, Abraham Lincoln caused the nation to pause and celebrate its bounty and blessings. Andy Malcolm at his Los Angeles Times blog dusts off that eloquent proclamation today along with President Obama's Thanksgiving decree. Enjoy reading them with a profound prayer of Thanksgiving and a hopeful wish for better times - soon - for all the world. Happy Thanksgiving.

Books, Books and Books

Good Reads for Winter The Lonely Planet guidebook recent published a Top 10 list of the world's greatest bookstores. (I'm happy to say I've browsed in three of the Top 10, including the stores that LP lists as No. 1 and No. 2.) That list of great bookstores got me thinking about the best books I've come across in the last few weeks. So in no particular order, here are a four good reads for winter. Two new presidential bios are out. Ron Chernow's Washington: A Life is a big, sprawling book about the president we all know, but really don't. As the Christian Science Monitor noted in its review: "From Washington’s churning emotions beneath a cool exterior to his love of ladies and dance, the hero of the Revolutionary War and America’s first president emerges as an admirable, flawed, and human figure." In other words, a more interesting and approachable man and politician than the stone figure of statues and myth.

The long awaited final volume of Edmund Morris' three-volume life of Theodore Roosevelt - Colonel Roosevelt - is also in the bookstores. I haven't read it yet, but the NPR interview with Morris about the post-presidential life of the great TR was absolutely fascinating. The first two volumes of this trio were simply superb history and biography and, I'm betting, the final volume will be just as good.

The New York Times said of Morris' opus that it "deserves to stand as the definitive study of its restless, mutable, ever-boyish, erudite and tirelessly energetic subject. Mr. Morris has addressed the toughest and most frustrating part of Roosevelt’s life with the same care and precision that he brought to the two earlier installments. And if this story of a lifetime is his own life’s work, he has reason to be immensely proud."

Two new books on United States foreign policy in the post-war world deserve praise. Presidential historian Robert Dallek has produced an assessment of the post-World War II blunders of most of the world's major leaders - Truman, Stalin, de Gaulle, Churchill, among others. The book - The Lost Peace - argues that the Cold War wasn't inevitable and might well have been avoided.

Dallek reminds us, for example, that Vietnamese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh spent significant time during his younger days in the United States, Britain and France. Ho's guerrilla activities, aimed at the Japanese and Vichy France during the war, were all about Vietnamese nationalism. Dallek makes a compelling case that a lack of imagination on the part of American policy makers coupled with de Gaulle's desire to maintain French colonies after the war pushed Ho toward open confrontation with the West. Ho repeatedly petitioned President Truman for acknowledgement of Vietnamese aspirations for independence. Truman never responded.

Another book of note examines the Cold War from the perspective of two giants of American foreign policy from the 1940's to the end of the century. The Hawk and The Dove by Nicholas Thompson tells the story of the friendship and rivalry between "the hawk" Paul Nitze, a career Washington policy insider, and "the dove" George Kennan, a Soviet expert who spent most of his life trying to influence policy from the outside. Thompson is a deft storyteller and great researcher who is also Nitze's grandson, but he never plays favorites.

As the Washington Post said, "In this important and astute new study, Nitze emerges as a driven patriot and Kennan as a darkly conflicted and prophetic one."

Late in life the two brilliant men reconciled their political differences and Nitze, while never admitting it, came to embrace Kennan's view that nuclear weapons must be reduced and eventually eliminated. This is a great book if you want to better understand American foreign policy from Roosevelt to Reagan.

If you're not quite ready to tackle Sarah Palin's latest, any one of these four very good books will provide real insight into American politics and history and provide a great way to spend a winter evening or weekend.

The Man

The Last Great of His Generation There was much appropriate notice the last few days of the 90th birthday of Stan "The Man" Musial, the great outfielder for the St. Louis Cardinals. The single best line about Musial was uttered by the guy who may just be the current "best player in the game" - Albert Pujols, also a Cardinal. The Great Pujols told St. Louis fans never to refer to him as El Hombre. There is only one Man in St. Louis, says Albert. Perhaps because he labored in a smaller market than Ted Williams or Joe DiMaggio, and was by all accounts a nicer guy not given to ignoring writers or marrying movie stars, Musial hasn't always gotten the attention or worn the laurels that his lifetime .331 average and sweet left handed swing demands. It's wonderful to listen to the late, great Cardinal broadcaster Jack Buck praise Musial not as just a great ballplayer, but a fine person. As the Baseball Library website notes: "When he retired, Musial owned or shared 29 NL records, 17 ML records, 9 All-Star records, including most home runs (6), and almost every Cardinals career offensive record. In 1956 [Sporting News] named Musial its first Player of the Decade." Now, President Obama will bestow the Presidential Medal of Freedom on The Man in a White House ceremony next year. Pretty fast company, too, Bill Russell, Yo-Yo Ma and a baseball playing ex-president George H.W. Bush. St. Louis Post-Dispatch sportswriter Bernie Miklasz put together a Top 90 list of things to like about Musial. The first, according to Miklaswz, "Musial is the nicest person we've known. He's devoted much of his life to making others happy. 'I suppose it's because I'm a you-only-live-once type, and I figure I might as well enjoy everything that happens,' Musial said at the end of his career. 'It's also with me pretty much a matter of putting myself in somebody else's place. So what I try to do is never to hurt anybody else and figure if I don't, then I'm not likely to get hurt myself.'" Sounds like a guy who is worthy of a Presidential Medal.

Those Awful Earmarks

Just About the Least of the Problems The Constitution of the United States of America says in Article I, Section 9: "No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time." Just to be clear, it is the specific duty of the Congress of the United States to appropriate money. The Founders set it up that way. Deciding the priorities of how the federal government spends your money is what Congress does. The federal budget represents one of the most excruciatingly complex processes in our democracy. It is difficult to explain in simple English, but it goes something like this: Federal agencies, through the Executive Branch (the president) present requests to the Legislative Branch (Congress). Congress considers those recommendations and authorizes a certain level of spending for, say, the Department of Defense. Then the Appropriations Committees of the House and Senate determine how much will be spent on this weapons system or that air base. A tiny fraction of the money authorized - one or two percent - has typically been directed to certain projects or purposes by your representatives. Think back to Article I, Section 9. These directed appropriations are the now toxic and dreaded earmarks. Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, the GOP leader in the Senate, has been a champion of securing earmarks for his state - $1 billion in recent years - but he has now sworn off the dirty business. Same goes for Colorado Democrat Mark Udall. President Obama is on the earmark ban-wagon. Most of these sensible legislators and the president are vowing to disown earmarks not because ending their use really has anything to do with controlling the massive federal budget, but because the dreaded earmark has become a symbol for an out of control federal budget. Symbols can be useful, but frankly this debate is not helpful because it obscures the real challenges of controlling the budget.

Eliminating earmarks, even if the ban is strongly enforced and enterprising appropriators resist finding ways to finesse the ban, will reduce the budget by a tiny, tiny fraction. It's the equivalent of filling your gas tank with 50 bucks worth of fuel and then not squeezing the last three or four cents of gas into the tank. You might save a few cents at the pump, but you've still spent 50 dollars on gas. Former Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming, the co-chair of the controversial deficit reduction commission, dismisses the earmark ban as "sparrow belch." I think that means not consequential.

Earmarks are not the problem with the federal budget - not even close. The real problem is to provide a factual, realistic framework for what needs to be done to control the budget; a framework that the American public can understand. In short, political leaders need to do something that has virtually disappeared in our politics - they need to educate and inform in a sensible, candid manner.

If we devote all of the future debate about the budget to sideshows like bans on earmarks, the American people will never get engaged on what really needs to be done. Certainly there have been abuses of the earmark. Randy "Duke" Cunningham is in federal prison for essentially selling earmarks for political and personal favors, but the earmark is also the way a small state secures research dollars for a state university or a small hospital gets new equipment.

Banning earmarks will thwart another Duke Cunningham, but the cure may be worst than the disease and, fundamentally, a ban won't mean a thing to the deficit.

Other emerging strategies won't do much either. New GOP leaders in the Congress are proposing, as a budget strategy, a return to 2008 or earlier budget levels. Such a move might cut $100 billion in spending. The current deficit is about $1.3 trillion.

Small steps, including symbolic cuts like banning earmarks, don't just fail to address the deficit problem they risk being intellectually dishonest and they may serve to avoid doing what is really necessary - a wholesale assessment of spending and taxing and significant adjustments in both.

You can see why politicians are reluctant to engage in this serious conversation. Closer to home, a new poll in Idaho shows how vast the disconnect has become between public wants and public realism and understanding. The new poll says, in essence, that Idahoans, with the legislature facing a $340 million deficit at the state level, want no more budget cuts and no tax increases. Oh, if pressed, we could handle a big increase in the cigarette tax. This is the cake and eat too approach to fiscal reality.

The wise and measured Fareed Zakaria, writing in TIME, wonders if this looming debate over the budget and the deficit signals a fundamental turning point in American fortunes. "Historians may well look back," he says, "and say this was the point at which the U.S. began its long and seemingly irreversible decline."

It may indeed be a rare moment in American history when serious people step forward to talk about serious issues, or we may just settle for banning earmarks.

The Olbermann File

The Agony of Cable I have been trying for a week now to sort out just how I feel about this Keith Olbermann matter and I keep coming back to one question: Isn't his 15 minutes of fame about up? If you are a watcher of news about "the news," you know that the MSNBC host of the popular show Countdown was suspended for a few hours recently for violating an NBC News policy about employees of the news division making political contributions. In keeping with the general tone of cable TV, the hubbub over the Olbermann suspension has lasted longer than the Olbermann suspension. Now Howard Kurtz at The Daily Beast offers up the inevitable story - Olbermann has antagonized all his bosses at NBC who seem on the verge of showing him the studio door even as he enjoys the remainder of a four-year, $30 million contract. Don't bet on it. That last fact about money is perhaps all one really needs to know about this story. Keith Olbermann, a clever, opinionated partisan (playing a journalist on cable) gets paid a lot of money by the folks at MSNBC for performing essentially the same shtick five nights a week. He offers opinion and commentary in the guise of "news," interviews people with much the same point of view and draws a fairly large audience of like-minded Americans every night. Over at Fox, Bill O'Reilly does the same thing, as does Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. Nothing going on here has very much to do with news and nothing at all to do with the public interest. Meanwhile, the top brass at NBC looks pretty silly because they are trying to apply the old rules of TV news to the new reality of the openly partisan swamp of cable. Leave it to Jon Stewart to really sum this up: "Yes, MSNBC, it's a stupid rule, but at least it was enforced poorly." The very best thing I've read from the Olbermann file is the take from former ABC News correspondent Ted Koppel that appeared in the Washington Post. Koppel, a real journalist, made a telling point when he quoted Olbermann as saying the NBC rule he had violated just needed to be "adapted to the realities of 21st Century journalism." There you have it. Serious journalism on the tube is a dying institution. Some of the last surviving dinosaurs, the Tom Brokaws and Koppels, still show up to bemoan the good old days when the Keith Olbermann's further push the lines of what real journalists know to be acceptable, but even they know real news on TV is in its death throes. Cable and the vast corporationization of news has left the public interest notion on the curb, while entertainment masquerading as news drives ratings and money. Some of us can remember, as Ted Koppel does when: "Much of the American public used to gather before the electronic hearth every evening, separate but together, while Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Frank Reynolds and Howard K. Smith offered relatively unbiased accounts of information that their respective news organizations believed the public needed to know. The ritual permitted, and perhaps encouraged, shared perceptions and even the possibility of compromise among those who disagreed." That hopelessly old fashioned model, as Koppel says, was far from perfect, but it has much to recommend it that the antics of an Olbermann and a Beck certain don't. The reality of 21st Century journalism is simply money and ratings. The old fashioned sense that broadcasters had a public service role to play by virtue of their use of the public airwaves - a notion embodied in the 1927 federal legislation providing some framework for organizing those airwaves - has gone the way of 16 millimeter film. If you really wonder why our politics - brace yourself for the Lame Duck Session - are as dysfunctional, nasty and vacuous as they are, you can start to find the answer in the vast wasteland of cable "news." You'll find no notion of shared perception or compromise out there. Peel back the hot air and find the mother's milk of cable: it's all about the money. I seriously doubt MSNBC will dismiss Keith. It would be like firing your franchise. They hired him to be outspoken, full of himself and a shameless partisan. The powers to be at NBC are getting just what they have paid for and they are moralizing all the way to the bank. His 15 minutes of fame just got extended.

My Oh My...

Put Away the Rye Bread... Frankly, I'm getting tired of writing about old baseball guys leaving the game or dying. I'm just flat tired of it. And now, Niehaus. I loved Sparky Anderson and he died. I loved Bobby Cox and he retired. Lou Piniella is done. Ernie Harwell, the great Ernie, died in May. Now Dave. Winter is almost here and spring seems a distant, faint hope and now comes the news that Dave Niehaus, the Hall of Fame voice of the Mariners, is gone. It is not a comforting thought to contemplate no more long summer nights with Niehaus narrating another meaningless Mariners game, while I love every minute. I hate it. I'm going to miss Dave Niehaus as much as any old player who has left not to be replaced. If you read nothing else about baseball this winter, read Art Thiel's tribute to Niehaus in yesterday's Seattle Times. Here's the money line: "It's a damn shame that the Mariners never lived up to their play-by-play man." That's how good Niehaus was and how much he meant to this hapless franchise. Jay Buhner said he heard the news and wept for the first time since his mom died. Jay came up with a line I wish I would have said. Niehaus, he said, "could call a sunset." Yup. Think about the Mariners and what comes to mind? Junior, for sure, and Randy Johnson - we called him Cousin Randy in our house - but the real continuity of the Seattle ball club was more the voice of the play-by-play guy than any player or accomplishment. Niehaus was the Mariners in that rare way that a great voice and baseball play-by-play guy becomes the franchise. Harwell did it in Detroit and Harry Caray in Chicago. Red Barber once played that role for the Dodgers and Mel Allen for that team in the Bronx. Jon Miller is the voice of the Giants (and unbelievably no longer the voice of Sunday Night Baseball on ESPN) and Vin Scully may be the best (and only?) reason to listen to a Dodger game. Niehaus was like that for Seattle. The players loved him, little kids, too. Nothing against the cast of characters that has surrounded Niehaus all these years, but during a long Mariners outing, I always found myself waiting for him to get back on the air. The play on the field wasn't going to be any better, but the game would be. Damn. It is often said, usually correctly, that no one is irreplaceable. Niehaus was, irreplaceable that is. Oh sure, someone will sit in the seat in the spring, put on the headset and pull the mic in close, but he won't be Dave. As Art Thiel said, the Mariners have lost the one thing they got right - their voice. Damn.

"We Need to Listen..."

Time for an Adult Conversation? I listened to CNN's Candy Crowley the other night as she interviewed the new Congresswoman-elect from South Dakota, Kristi Noem. Noem, who defeated the incumbent Democrat last week, was pressed repeatedly on how she intended to keep her promises to reduce spending and balance the out of control federal deficit. Her answer: We need an adult conversation, but no specifics. Crowley pressed her, but what about specifics? Noem was smiling when she said "we need an adult conversation" about these things. "I ran on the campaign that we needed smaller, more limited government," Noem said in another interview, "we needed to cut our spending, we needed to make some tough decisions to make sure small businesses could still survive and exist. And that resonated across South Dakota." It certainly did and it resonates all across America. It will now be a fascinating exercise in political jujitsu to see how the newly elected - and re-elected - deal with the you-know-what that Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, the leaders of the bi-partisan deficit commission, just put in their pockets. Bowles and Simpson offered an early sneak preview this week of some of the ideas that simply must be on the table if Congresswoman-to-be Noem and others are serious about their campaign promises. Predictably, the "dead on arrival" proclamations are already being issued, one by Nancy Pelosi who almost instantly declared her opposition. That's crazy. President Obama said the adult thing, "before anybody starts shooting down proposals, I think we need to listen, we need to gather up all the facts." Adult conversations really need to begin with the facts. Here are a couple: we're not going to control the deficit by "symbolic" cuts in small discretionary spending, but nonetheless look for assaults on things like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowments as the sole answer. When you hear the would-be adults debate these issues, if the first thing you hear is that we need to go after the Peace Corps budget, you know you're listening to the kids squabble and not the adults converse. We are also not going to control the deficit without addressing three sacred cows: entitlements (like Social Security and Medicare), the defense budget and the tax structure. Simply can't happen. Adults, in conversation, know that and honest politicians in both parties need to start leveling with the American people. Just one more adult thought: the U.S. defense budget, thanks in large part to endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is now nearly as large as the defense budgets of the rest of the world combined. Do you think there is some savings to be had there? "If people are, in fact, concerned about spending, debt, deficits and the future of our country," Obama said yesterday, "then they're going to need to be armed with the information about the kinds of choices that are going to be involved, and we can't just engage in political rhetoric." You can get elected in America on a theory of how government and the economy works, but the reality of governing is based on facts, pain, shared sacrifice, honesty and candor. Let the adult conversation begin.

Accountability...Not So Much

Maybe Someone Needs to Go If a football coach - say for the Dallas Cowboys - had the kind of season that the leader of House Democrats has had they would be looking for work. But, politics ain't football, obviously. Eight games into the season, the Cowboys tied the can to coach Wade Phillips. Someone had to be held accountable. This is the big time, after all. The final straw was the Cowboys' 45-7 drubbing by the Green Bay Packers on Sunday. Sorry Wade. You are the responsible party. It's been nice knowing ya. Nancy Pelosi suffered a loss just as lopsided, just as devastating to an historic franchise, but with no commensurate accountability. Pelosi's decision to serve as House Minority Leader when Republicans take the majority in January is at once a testament to her determination as a political infighter and an indication of just how out of touch she is as a leader of a national party. In fairness to Pelosi, she is going to get a demotion, but she'd be doing her party and herself a favor by stepping off the political stage entirely. For all kinds of reasons, Pelosi, the liberal Democrat from San Francisco, has become the unpopular face of Washington, D.C. Conservatives are rejoicing that she will stay as the party leader in the House. Her continuation in leadership will be both a distraction for Democrats and a gift to those who have succeeded in making her the principle issue in many races, including the First District of Idaho, where she served as a deadly drain on moderate Democrats. I've been reading a fascinating new book - Churchill Defiant - by Barbara Leaming that focuses on the career of the great British Prime Minister after World War II. Churchill lost a crushing re-election campaign in 1945 just as the Allies had secured the long, hard victory over Nazi Germany. Churchill was badly hurt by the repudiation of the English people and, as anyone would, he took the defeat very personally. Like the Minority Leader-in-Waiting, Winston insisted in staying on as leader of his party despite the opposition, some of it very open and nasty, of most senior Conservatives. Churchill's health and even mental abilities, as Leaming carefully and sympathetically shows, were sharply in decline, but still the great man held on. Churchill, again like most of us, infused with basic human motivations, simply couldn't abide the notion of stepping down. His wife wanted him to, his friends and political associates thought it best, but he held on. In 1951, Churchill finally recaptured Downing Street, more because of the ineptness of the Labour Party than any other reason, but at age 77 he had become a shadow of what the British electorate and the world had come to expect. Leaming gives Churchill credit for being a fighter, but mostly he was fighting the inevitable decline of the British Empire and clinging to the idea of personal power no matter the cost. Understanding basic human instincts, it's easy to see why Nancy Pelosi wants to stay. She has been caricatured, at times in an unfair and truly vicious manner, as the Cruella de Vil of the Democratic Party and she clearly doesn't want to be shown the door by her political enemies. She passed historic, if hugely controversial, legislation and understandly wants to protect it from the long knives of her opponents. And, while she will have a secure place in the history books as the first woman Speaker of the House, she simply can't bring herself to walk off and leave the battle to others who will undoubtedly have a better chance to reconnect with the broad middle of the American electorate. Nothing Winston Churchill did after his rejection at the polls in 1945 helped define him for the history books. Had he left public life at that moment, his enormous reputation, as arguably the greatest figure of the 20th Century, would have been secure. The famous Iron Curtain speech was made while Churchill was leading the opposition in the House of Commons. Had he delivered that speech as a private citizen it would have had just as much impact and who is to say that his warnings about Soviet domination of eastern Europe wouldn't have had even more importance coming from a senior statesman with no personal agenda at stake. Even the greatest leaders are driven by ego and the need for personal vindication. It is hard to known when to go. The principled departure is something most American politicians have never embraced. It is a shame because it can have real power both for the person leaving and those left to carry on.

Dewey Defeats Truman

Obama's Model - Not 1994, but 1948 November 2nd will be long remembered for "the shellacking," as Barack Obama put it, that he and Democrats took in the mid-term elections. It was a near historic rout often compared to the thumping Bill Clinton and Democrats took in 1994. But the election Obama ought to be studying for clues to his comeback in two years time is not '94, but Harry Truman's spectacular return from political death on another November 2nd in 1948. Like Obama after last week's election, Truman seemed like a dead man walking after the 1946 mid-terms. Republicans captured both houses of Congress, gaining 55 seats in the House and a dozen in the Senate, including the election of very conservative Republicans like Joseph McCarthy in Wisconsin, Zales Ecton in Montana and Henry Dworshak in Idaho. No question, 1946 was a banner year for the GOP. The big Republican win came with, and in part as a result of, Truman's popularity being in the ditch. By election time, the President's approval rating had slumped to 32%. As Truman's best biographer David McCullough has written: "According to one of the latest Washington jokes in the autumn of 1946, Truman was late for a Cabinet meeting because he woke up stiff in the joints from trying to put his foot in his mouth." Another line held that "to err is Truman." The Democratic defeat was so massive in 1946 and Truman's role in bringing it about so obvious, that first -term Arkansas Sen. J. William Fulbright actually suggested that Truman, with no vice president to replace him, should resign the presidency after appointing respected Republican Sen. Arthur Vandenberg Secretary of State. Vandenberg would then become President and would be able to avoid what Fulbright saw as the fearsome prospect of divided government presided over by a hugely unpopular chief executive. Truman responded by forever referring to Fulbright as "Halfbright" and instead he came out fighting. The seeds of Obama's resurrection from the shellacking of the 2010 mid-terms may reside in Truman's response 64 years ago. Truman doubled down on the Republicans, challenged them to enact their plans; plans strikingly similar to today - spending reductions, dismantling various social programs and opposition to national health care reform. No one - except Harry Truman - thought he could win in 1948, but he did and convincingly. Truman delighted in the fact that the very conservative Chicago Tribune got the election outcome wrong in its famous headline - Dewey Defeats Truman. As Frank Rich noted in the New York Times Sunday, Obama can make a virtue, if he will, of the obvious and soon to grow splits in Republican ranks. In other words, he needs to shift the focus from his agenda to the new Republican agenda. If the darlings of the Tea Party - Michelle Bachmann and Jim DeMint - really want, as Bachmann says, "to wean the country off Social Security and Medicare," perhaps Obama should challenge them to bring forth the legislation. John Boehner and Mitch McConnell say they want to repeal the health care legislation and the President should welcome the discussion as the best chance he'll have to reframe the national debate to make the case, in personal terms, that he has yet to make for the controversial legislation. Obama needs to get out a Glenn Beck-style blackboard in the Roosevelt Room and explain how the GOP wants to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans by borrowing the money from China in order to keep putting the cash in Donald Trump's or Michael Bloomberg's pockets. Every Tea Partier and Congressional Republican, and most Democrats, want to cut spending. OK, where and when do we start? The first qualifier when the talk turns to spending cuts is usually to take defense, homeland security and entitlements off the budget chopping block. That leaves about 15 cents of every dollar the federal government spends eligible for cuts. Obama should ask, where do we start? Student loans? The National Parks? Maybe raising the retirement age to 70 or eliminating the Department of Education? Maybe we ditch the new generation of littoral fighting ships the Navy desperately wants. That would save a cool $8 billion. Let's really have the debate. In his re-election in 1948 after his disastrous shellacking two years earlier, Harry Truman called the GOP bluff. As he suspected, the Republican's ability to enact their program was much more limited than their ability to criticize Truman's performance. Specifics and a lack of performance by the GOP eventually won out over hyperbole. There is at least one other reason why Barack Obama should engage the new crowd in Congress directly on their ideas: the country desperately needs an adult conversation about priorities, spending, the deficit, the defense budget and entitlements. What better time to have it? For two years, Obama's operated his presidency in an often detached and dispassionate way. His White House seems to be all tactics, no overarching vision. Unless he provides that vision - and one way he can begin is to aggressively engage the Michelle Bachmann's, Jim DeMint's and Rand Paul's of the new Congress - he will be a one-term president and, even worse, the great and serious debate the country needs about its priorities will disintegrate into a black swamp of politics as usual played out in dueling soundbites on Fox and MSNBC. In David McCullough's Truman, the superb Pulitzer Prize-winning story of the fighter from Missouri, the chapter on the 1948 election concludes with the analysis of Clark Clifford, Truman's chief aide and strategist during that historic election. "He was a good politician," Clifford said of Truman, "a sensible politician...But that wasn't why he was elected President...it was the remarkable courage in the man - his refusal to be discouraged, his willingness to go through the suffering of that campaign, the fatigue, the will to fight every step of the way, the will to win... "It wasn't Harry Truman the politician who won, it was Harry Truman the man."

Let the Recriminations Begin

Winning and Losing In the cold, grey aftermath of the drubbing Democrats received on Tuesday, President Obama is too reserved, too buttoned down and too cool to use, at least in public, the language of a long ago unsuccessful Democratic candidate for the California Legislature. But, he must be thinking what Dick Tuck once said. Tuck was a political operative and self-proclaimed "dirty trickster" who bedeviled Richard Nixon and once opened his own State Senate race with a speech in a cemetery. Dead people needed a voice in politics, too, he said. After a Nixon-Kennedy debate in 1960, Tuck paid an elderly women to approach Nixon and say: “Don’t worry, son. He beat you last night, but you’ll win next time.” Good stuff, but not as good as his classic quote. After his State Senate loss in 1966, Tuck said at his concession, "the people have spoken...the bastards." Obama must feel something similar, but his now well-established detachment - is that part of his problem - keeps him from expressing such sentiments and showing any genuine emotion. As we total up the winners and losers from the Democratic debacle this week, the now profoundly challenged Obama heads the "L" column. As much as he has been tested by a controversial preacher, Hillary Clinton, a Great Recession and two wars, his political challenges are just beginning. Adversity can make or break a politician. This is Obama's political test. The best - and most successful politicians - have an knack for self reflection; an ability to check and recalibrate long held assumptions. Obama has a tendency to describe all circumstances he faces in terms of a policy choice, but what he faces is fundamentally a leadership challenge. We will see soon enough if he is up to the challenge. Here is one suggestion. Before too much time passes, Obama should get Speaker-to-be John Boehner on the golf course. Seriously. Boehner loves the game - Golf Digest lists him as the 36th best golfer in Washington - and Obama loves to play, as well. It's more difficult to talk past some guy you've played 18 with, even if he gives you strokes and then beats you. Seriously. Closer to home a big winner this week is the once and future Governor of Oregon John Kitzhaber. With a deep red tide running nationally, Kitzhaber grabbed a narrow win, the first third term in Oregon history and a chance to make a mark on Oregon's feeble economy. As noted here in the past, comebacks are hard - particularly for former governors, but Kitzhaber joins former and future Governors Jerry Brown in California and Terry Branstad in Iowa as some of the comeback kids in this cycle. There are many, many Republican winners this week - Boehner, Haley Barbour, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Idaho's Mike Simpson (new Appropriations and EPA oversight clout), Oregon's Greg Walden (Boehner's transition leader) and on and on, but in raw political terms there is no bigger winner among the many Democratic losers than Harry Reid. Considering the dynamics of Reid's race and the fact that he is loathed by many of his constituents, the fact that he survived against a Tea Party rival, even one as fundamentally flawed as a candidate as Sharron Angle, is remarkable. Steve Friess writes at The Daily Beast that Reid won the old fashioned way by running a dogged, determined campaign that left no detail unattended. "By the time he strolled onto the stage on Tuesday arm-in-arm with wife Landra wearing a Cheshire Cat grin," Friess writes, "all of Reid’s best-laid plans had gone perfectly and he had not only won but done so convincingly." But, back to that jokester Dick "The Voters Have Spoken" Tuck. Maybe we could use some of his mostly harmless good humor in our current polarized political culture. Time magazine noted back in 1973 that Tuck briefly attached himself to then-Sen. George McGovern's presidential campaign against Nixon, but as it turned out with limited success. "McGovern did not seem to appreciate a good joke much more than Nixon," Time reported. "When [Nixon] and some fat cats were about to pay a visit to [Nixon's Treasury Secretary] John Connally's ranch, Tuck proposed sending a Brink's armored car to the scene followed by a Mexican laundry truck. But the McGovernites vetoed the suggestion." In place of the ultra-nasty political air wars we've all endured, we could use a few more clever, not mean, political pranks like Tuck's. Humor in politics is a good thing. Here's wishing - for both winners and losers on Tuesday - that they find a way to add a little humor to the necessary post-election self reflection and that a healthy dose of modesty now replace the bombast and hyperbole. And, of course, no talking during the back swing. A bitter election and the serious problems confronting the country now demand the best of all of this week's survivors.

Wipe Out

Idaho GOP More Firmly in Control If yesterday's election in Idaho had been a Little League baseball game, it would have been called on account of the ten run rule. Republicans gained four seats in the state House of Representatives, held all the Constitutional offices and recaptured the Congressional seat held for the last two years by Democrat Walt Minnick. As elections go, this one was a tidal wave. The huge Republican majorities in the Idaho Legislature will soon enough face big challenges, including more budget cutting - potentially including education and social services - but the GOP and Gov. Butch Otter can bask, for a while at least, in the sure knowledge that voters were in no mood to punish them for historic cuts in school spending or for presiding over a still struggling economy. Quite the contrary, Idaho Republicans seem more dominate than ever against a dispirited, disorganized opposition. Otter's victory was nothing short of astounding. He won just over 59% of the vote against four opponents and held Democrat Keith Allred to the worst showing for a Democratic gubernatorial candidate since 1998. Allred's eastern Idaho and Magic Valley strategy was a bust. The governor polled nearly exactly the same number of votes in Bonneville County (Idaho Falls) as he did in 2006, but Allred didn't come close to matching the vote Democrat Jerry Brady managed in the same area four years earlier. With his LDS faith becoming a focus of attention in October, Allred carried not a single county in heavily Mormon eastern Idaho. He only came close in Bannock County (Pocatello) where Brady beat Otter four years ago. When all was said and done, Allred won only two counties - dependably Democratic Blaine (Sun Valley) and Latah (Moscow) by a narrow margins. In the Raul Labrador - Minnick race, there will be, I suspect, a good deal of analysis of Minnick's hard hitting television attacks on the Republican, but the backlash factor - and there was a backlash - can't entirely account for Labrador's comfortable ten point win. Minnick, always an uncomfortable Democrat in a very conservative district, won by the wave in 2008 and lost by it, as well. In a year when the GOP was headed to a nearly 60 seat pickup in the U.S. House of Representatives, it was - in perfect hindsight - nearly impossible that one of those seats was not going to be in the First District of Idaho. Take nothing away from Congressman-elect Labrador. Out spent 5 to 1, he pulled two "upsets" this year - a primary and a general election win, neither of which he was expected to accomplish. There was nothing anti-incumbent about this election. It was anti-Democrat. Idaho is painted deep RED today and it is likely to stay that way for a long, long time.

A Green Place Around Home

The Giants Win Like most baseball fans, I gained my appreciation of the game from my dad. I've been thinking about him a lot lately what with a big election coming down and the Giants in the World Series. We would have visited - we didn't talk, we visited - about both, but mostly we would have visited about the baseball. He would have remembered Bill Terry and Carl Hubbell and given a nod to that catch Mays made in '54 at the old Polo Grounds the last time the Giants won the whole thing. But, mostly I can hear him marvel at the pitching and the story he loved to tell about the great feat of the great Hubbell. "You know," he would have said, "Carl Hubbell once struck out five future Hall of Famers in a row in the All Star Game. Imagine that. Striking out Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, Al Simmons and Joe Cronin one after the other. Amazing." He would have picked the Giants to beat the Rangers because "good pitching beats good hitting in a short series every time." Once again, the old man had it right. He would have marveled at Timmy, but would have disapproved of his hairstyle. I've liked the Giants as long as I've liked baseball, so the World Series win over the equally worthy Texas Rangers will be a great memory for a long time. I particularly like this team because it is so clearly a team. So many baseball teams, even great ones, seem like a mere collection of individuals wearing the same uniform. Baseball, at its best, is still a team game where the power hitting first baseman can lay down a bunt and where the role playing shortstop wins the MVP, or where the rookie catcher can praise the freaky pitcher, but then acknowledge the importance of bringing in the equally freaky closer to end the last game of a magical season. So, as Detroit Tiger fan Art Hill once suggested in his book I Don't Care If I Ever Come Back, the season has ended just like that and we can become consumed again with politics, the economy, war and elections. Baseball's well-lighted place that keeps the demons away until dawn has vanished, but thankfully not completely. "Our character and our culture are reflected in this grand game," in the words of the late, great Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti. "It would be foolish to think that all our national experience is reflected in any single institution, even our loftiest, but it would not be wrong to claim for baseball a capacity to cherish individuality and inspire cohesion in a way that is a hallmark of our loftiest institutions. Nor would it be misguided to think that, however vestigial the remnants of our best hopes, we can still find, if we wish to, a moment called a game when those hopes have life, when each of us, those who are in and those out, has a chance to gather, in a green place around home." April will come and none too soon.

Writer for Camelot

Theodore Sorensen, 1928 - 2010 Before his health began to decline, Ted Sorensen wrote one of the great political memoirs of our time. He simply called it Counselor. Sorensen's joked that his obituaries would say that "Theodore Sorenson, John Kennedy's speechwriter..." had died, both misspelling his name and misstating his role as perhaps Kennedy's most important aide. Sorensen, who died over the weekend at age 82, was among the last of the Kennedy men and so much more than a speechwriter, although he was among the very best to ever practice the craft. Kennedy referred to the Nebraska-born Sorensen, who joined JFK's senate staff and later presidential campaign at age 27, as his "intellectual blood bank." Historian Douglas Brinkley said Sorensen was the Kennedy Administration's "indispensable man." Sorensen became the young president's closest aide, second only to Robert Kennedy in enjoying - and understanding - Kennedy's aspirations and secrets. Anyone who appreciates the still real power of effective political speech must admire the words that Sorensen shaped and crafted in collaboration with Kennedy, perhaps one of the three or four most eloquent American presidents. For his part, Sorensen thought the letter to authored to the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, that helped defuse the Cuban missile crisis was his greatest work. Sorensen always claimed his collaboration with Kennedy - that is the right word for a speechwriter - was the product of deep trust and understanding developed over long hours spent together and, of course, a shared political philosophy. At the very end of his very personal, very revealing memoir, Ted Sorensen wrote, "I'm still an optimist. I still believe that extraordinary leaders can be found and elected, that future dangers can be confronted and resolved, that people are essentially good and ultimately right in their judgments. I still believe that a world of law is waiting to emerge, enshrining peace and freedom throughout the world. I still believe that the mildest most obscure Americans can be rescued from oblivion by good luck, sudden changes in fortune, sudden encounters with heroes. "I believe it," Sorensen wrote, "because I lived it."