Hillary Clinton's Foreign Policy Speech and JFK

I thought, as I was watching Hillary Clinton's superb speech about foreign policy in San Diego on television today, that she reminded me of JFK, his optimism for America and its engagement with the world. Later on MSNBC, Chris Matthews also said he saw a connection between Clinton's speech and JFK.

More specifically, Matthews said Clinton's speech reminded him of America's unapologetic approach to foreign policy before the Vietnam War, which can indeed be equated, at least in part, to JFK.

I was a fierce opponent of the Vietnam War.  It not only was unconstitutional but unwarranted, and it nearly tore the country apart.  I got teargassed in Washington protesting that war, and was barely able to bring myself to vote for Hubert Humphrey over Richard Nixon in 1968 because of it.   Matthews is right that among its many casualties was the bright, bold view of America as the leader of the world, and the best it has to offer.

Significantly, although JFK indeed got us far more involved in Vietnam than we should have been, it was LBJ who expanded this into the all-out war and disaster it became.   It was therefore JFK's assassination, more than JFK himself, that tragically set this in motion.

Although we've had our great moments in foreign policy and world affairs since then - including, in different ways, from Nixon (opening relations with China), Reagan (end of Soviet Union) and Obama (better relations with Iran and Cuba) - we've yet to regain that sense of confidence and moral leadership that we had under JFK.

Hillary Clinton's speech this afternoon was the first I've really heard or seen of that since the early 1960s, when I was just a kid.   Not only is it an inspiring tonic for the insanity of Trump and the dangerous isolationism of saner people on both sides of the isle, it is a blueprint for a better America and a better world, which as the speech made clear, is increasingly one and the same.

I don't know who wrote this speech, but I'm sure Ted Sorenson would've been proud.

Trump and The Day After

I mentioned this in my review of The Americans 2.9, aired last night, which featured the major characters watching The Day After, the post-nuclear bomb movie first watched by more than 100 million television viewers back in 1983.   One of the Soviet spies in The Americans, Elizabeth, mentions that the U.S. was the only country to have dropped the atom bomb (back in 1945).   I thought, as I saw this on TV last night, that it's a hopeful thing that no nation has used nuclear weapons since 1983, either.

And then I thought of Donald Trump.  And I realized that when you strip away all the bombast and racism and personal attacks, you have a man with a temper and access to the nuclear trigger were he to become President.

It's not his complete lack of governing experience per se that's the cause for concern.  Eisenhower had zero political experience, but commanded the Allied Army that beat the Nazis in World War II.   He, in other words, had massive experience with weapons.  And though Ronald Reagan spent a lot his life as an actor, he was Governor of California, a populous and diverse state, before he was elected President.

Trump has none of that.   In response to one of the terrorist attacks last year, he's already said he would "bomb the shit" out of ISIS.   Can we be confident that he would not use nuclear weapons as part of that attack?  And provoke some sort of counter nuclear attack as well as contaminating the affected area with radiation for decades?

His temper is unfortunately very obvious.   To even the mildest of criticisms, he lashes out with insults.   And while it's true that words are not physical weapons, can anyone want a person with his temperament in the White House?

We need someone with a maximum of foreign policy experience, which is one reason I support Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders.  But whoever the Democratic nominee is, we - everyone with a modicum of sanity - need to do all in our electoral power to make sure Donald Trump never gets near a nuclear weapon.

Fargo 2.6: Just Superb

I just want to say how outstanding this second season of Fargo has been so far - indeed, heretical though it may be to say so, better than the first season, which was excellent indeed.  But this second season is moving much faster, is more dynamic, and has less of the quirks that slowed down the first season a little.

Don't get me wrong. I love the quirks, they're essential to the Fargo story.  But somehow, in the first season, they got a little in the way of the narrative, until its last few shows.

In contrast, season 2 is just blasting along.  Last week's episode, which I didn't get a chance to review, had a priceless conversation between Ronald Reagan - beginning to run for President in 1979 - and Lou, in the bathroom.  The best part of that, in classic Fargo fashion, is what Reagan didn't say and couldn't say, when he makes some Reaganesque noise in his throat and leaves the men's room in response to Lou's questions.

Last night, Lou had a fabulous episode, defending Ed from Bear Gerhardt and navigating his escape from the sheriff's office.  The only thing we know for sure is that Lou won't die - because he's alive and well in season 1 in the future - but, otherwise, anyone can go in this story, and that's what's been happening in the past few episodes.  So the lawyer's role in saving Ed was heart-in-mouth, because he could have been blown away at any minute.

Peggy had a good night, too, and it's not clear whether she killed Dodd with the electric cattle prod - a taser for before its time - or just knocked him out cold.   Similarly, we don't know what happened in the Gerhardt house when all the shooting began, though I think there was a glimpse of Mamma in the coming attractions.   The best candidate for death in Gerhardt house would be the father, because, let's face it, he's well on his way there already.

There's nothing else like Fargo on television - nothing as wryly, darkly literate and exciting at the same time - and I can only hope this series continues for a long long time.

See also: Fargo 2.1: Good to be Back in the Freezer

And see also: Fargo Debuts with Two Psychos ... Fargo 1.7: The Bungling and the Brave ... Fargo 1.8: The Year ... Fargo Season 1 Finale: The Supremely Cunning Anti-Hero



A story about another kind of killer ...  The Silk Code

#SFWApro

The City of Conversation at Lincoln Center

My wife and I saw "The City of Conversation" at Lincoln Center last night - beautifully staged in a small theater in the round, and telling a powerful political and personal story.

We see a family, already a bit dysfunctional but what family isn't, at three crucial points in American political history:  September 1979, October 1987, and January 2009.

The 1979 segment is about the final sunset on the progressive 1960s.   The heroine, Hester Ferris, has to defend her Kennedy-esque views against her son and his fiance, who surprisingly turn out to be Reagan conservatives.   Hester is still hoping that Teddy can save the day.   I thought so, too, in those days, but history said otherwise.

The Vietnam War and the damage it did to the American spirit was still very much in the air.   On that subject, my wife picked up this brief rendition about the Vietnam War from a gentleman explaining it to someone sitting in the row behind her.   "JFK started it, LBJ expanded it, and Nixon tried to get us out it." I guess two out of three ain't bad - Nixon's way of "trying" was to bomb North Vietnam and extend the bombing to Cambodia.  (If you'd like see to a truthful hour on the Vietnam War, watch the CNN episode of the "The Sixties".)

Back to the play on the stage, the other really powerful character is the son's fiance, Anna Fitzgerald, who provides an eloquent defense of Reagan and the hard-hat everyday American whom, she is sure, was bypassed in civil rights progress of the 1960s.   In the second era of the play, 1987, she has moved to an even more provocative position:  she prefers Republican men, she says, because they don't apologize for looking at her "ass".   What's at stake in this segment of the play is the end of Reagan era, as epitomized in the impending failure of his Bork nomination to the Supreme Court.

This part of the play was astonishingly relevant last night, given the Hobby Lobby decision, in which the swing voter Anthony Kennedy went with conservatives on the Court.  Kennedy was the nominee after Bork failed to attain Senate confirmation, and although he has been better than Bork on some decisions, his decisions on Bush v. Gore and now Hobby Lobby have been egregious.

In the play, Anna wants Hester to not publicly attack Bork, lest it hurt Hester's son, now working for a Republican Senator, and of course Anna, who is working for the Reagan Justice Department.   Anna eventually plays the ultimate card: she will not let Hester see her grandson, Ethan, if Hester continues with her plan to denounce Bork in the newspapers.   It's an exquisite moment in the play, as Hester refuses to be blackmailed by her daughter-in-law.

In the last segment, on the night of Obama's first inauguration, Ethan, now grown and gay, comes to visit his grandmother, with his partner - an African-American man who is a graduate student at Columbia. Ethan campaigned for Obama, and is going with his partner to the inaugural balls, so the tension we see with his grandmother is not political, but comes from his belief, stoked by his parents, that his grandmother didn't want to see him all of these years.   Their rapprochement was another emotional highpoint of this excellent play.

Written by Anthony Giardina (who has touches of Arthur Miller and David Mamet), well acted all around - with tour-de-force performances by Jan Maxwell as Hester and Kristen Bush as Anna - "The City of Conversation" was a perfect play to see in the eve of July 4, and indeed any time.

The Americans 1.4: Preventing World War III

Just heard the news that The Americans is being renewed for a second season - excellent, in view of how good the first season has been so far.   Consider, for example, 1.4, on last night, in which both Soviet and American agents, working not in concert, manage to stop a possible nuclear war between the USSR and the USA.

The trigger is the Reagan shooting of 1981, compounded by Secretary of State Haig's now infamous statement that he's "in control" of the government.   Haig was not only wrong constitutionally - a couple of elected officials stand between the VP and Secretary of State in succession to the Presidency - but his clumsy statement gives the Soviets the wrong idea that there may be a coup underway in the USA, which would prompt the Soviet Union to take some sort of military action to protect its interests.

There is a fearful, perfectly portrayed symmetry between the Soviet and American  agents and how they each work on their own to stop this dangerous escalation.  Phillip is the first to see that there may not be a coup going on here at all.   Though he and Elizabeth have been here the same amount of time, he is much more perceptive about American political culture than is she.  Elizabeth therefore at first opposes Phillip - and indeed kills a security guard in one of their surveillance missions - but one of the best parts of this series is how to the two come to reach conclusions through and in spite of their different starting points.  The fact that Elizabeth is now falling in love with her husband, after all of these years, also helps - and is a good motive point in the plot.

Meanwhile, Stan uses his own contact with Soviets to get a handle on how the Soviets are reacting, and is able to convey to his superiors that no massive military action is imminent or even under planning.  And, then, in a sweet move for the relative peace of the world, he tells his neighbors that American intelligence knows the KGB was not behind the assassination attempt.   Since his neighbors just happen to be Phillip and Elizabeth, this is the final defusing element in the story.

As I've written earlier, Stan being the neighbor of Elizabeth and Phillip is the one conceit of the plot set-up which seems unlikely.   But it was worked to great effect in this episode, and I'm looking forward more than ever to what may come next.

See also The Americans: True and Deep

V Returns to TV

Kenneth Johnson's original 1983 mini-series V - along with its 1984 sequel V: The Final Battle - was oddly one of my favorite television shows. Actually, it still is. But I say "oddly," because although the story was trite - aliens landing on Earth, claiming they want to help us, only to eat us - the media savvy and political implications were compelling.

Damon Knight's 1950 short story "To Serve Man," adapted into one of the most enduring Twilight Zone episodes in 1962, told the story best. Aliens land, cure our illnesses, bring peace, want happiness for us - because they view us as livestock. V in 1983 expanded this story to show the aliens - The Visitors - manipulating the media, and provoking underground freedom fighters all over the world who discovered the truth about The Visitors. Indeed, V posted a dedication "to the heroism of the resistance and the freedom fighters, past, present and future." In 1983, freedom fighters encompassed everyone from the Hungarians who bravely stood up to Soviet tanks in the 1950s (viewed as heroes by most Americans) to Contras fighting the Sandinistas in power in Nicaragua in the 1980s (viewed as heroes mostly by Ronald Reagan and his supporters).

Tonight's V had political analogies, but a little more obvious and less complex than the 1980s version. Tonight's Visitors promise "universal health care," a clear and unnecessary shot at the good work Obama and the Democrats are trying to do right now in Washington. A more apt connection was made tonight between the Visitors and terrorists.

Actually, the Visitors are referred to as the "V's" in this incarnation, and I prefer the "Visitors". But V 2009 does have Father Jack Landry (Joel Gretsch, who played Frank Vasser on Journeyman), which opens up some good theological threads (I'm suspecting his superior might be a Visitor undercover), and Lost's Elizabeth Mitchell has a top role as Erica Evans.

The new version also has the winning mix of good and bad Visitors, and Visitor-collaborator and rebel humans as the original, as well as some echoes of Battlestar Galactica (the Visitors as Cylons), and an appealing media criticism component, so I'm going to give it a chance. And kudos to ABC for stepping up with science fiction a lot more than once this decade - Lost, Invasion, FlashForward, and now the return of V.


5-min podcast review of V

Excellent That Chris Matthews May Run for Senate

I just heard, again, on Wolf Blitzer's Late Edition on CNN, that MSNBC's Chris Matthews may run as a Democrat against Republican Arlen Specter for his Senate seat in Pennsylvania in 2010. Reports about this are flying all over the place.

I hope it's true. I live in New York, but I'd vote for Chris Matthews not only over Specter but just about anyone. I agree with most of Matthews' positions - his consistent opposition, from the beginning, to the war in Iraq, and his enthusiastic support of Obama are what most come to mind - but I also like the fact that, although he was once a Tip O'Neill staffer, and ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1974, Chris Matthews is currently very much an outsider in politics.

We have long recognized that a life in politics is by no means a prerequisite for high office. Whatever we may think of Reagan and Schwarzenegger's governance - I certainly opposed a lot of Reagan's - there is no denying their effectiveness in office. Indeed, Renaissance men were among our leading Founding Fathers - in an age before xerox, Thomas Jefferson invented a way of automatically making a copy of a letter, as it was being written.

Matthews on television has been articulate and passionate. The main problem with his brand of Hardball is that he frequently interrupts and talks over his guests. That could be a big asset in the Senate.

Breath of Fresh Air First Press Conference from President-Elect Obama

Barack Obama just completed his first press conference as President-elect - intelligent, responsive, short, a breath of fresh air.

The emphasis was on the economy, but Obama also answered questions about Ahmadinejad's letter of congratulations and the puppy he will be buying for Sasha and Malia. He missed a chance on that question to say he would be careful not to get a dog that bites reporters - as the Bush dog Barney did to a Reuters reporter yesterday - but he handled that question with humor and a winning concern as a father for Malia's allergies.

It has been a long time since we have had a President with that degree of intellectual acuity, articulation, and humor. JFK and Ronald Reagan are the only ones that come to mind for me.

It felt very good to see it again. I'm looking forward to more.

Make the Dream Come True

I learned a long time ago that the really big events in politics and elections and their consequences are unpredictable almost until the time they occur. I was a kid when JFK was elected, and supported him in the campaign, but I had no idea his Presidency would lead to the liberating revolutions of the 1960s, and a human being on the Moon by the end of the decade. I thought Reagan was a joke when he was governor of California, and thought he would lose to Carter, and even when he won, I didn't think his Presidency would have much impact. When Bush was first reported as winning Florida in 2000, I was aggravated to say the least, and when Gore was on top by the end of the night I was thrilled - I had no idea that the US Supreme Court would make Bush President in the end.

I first became aware of Barack Obama when I saw him speak, on television, at the 2004 Democratic Convention in Boston. My son, covering the convention and the speech for The Harvard Crimson, saw that speech in person. My whole family thought Obama was great. I don't think a single one of us thought he really had a chance at the White House in 2008.

I endorsed Obama in my blog last December. I later said I thought he'd win the popular vote by 10% and the Electoral College handily. I of course had no real knowledge - those predictions were an instinct, a hope, a dream of setting America and the world on a better course.

And now it all comes down to tomorrow. The polls say Obama is ahead. But the only poll that counts, as everyone knows, is what happens at the actual polls.

I'm pulling for a fulfillment of what couldn't have been predicted even five years ago.

We've had a lot bad surprises in the past decades. America and humanity are due to have a good one.

As Obama just said in his closing speech in Manassas, Virginia, broadcast on CSPAN: Fired Up! Ready to Go!

Getting Ready for Friday's Debate - Some Blasts from the Past

The AP has put together this video of some classic Presidential debate highlights ... JFK in 1960 looks a little more pasty than I recall, but still way stronger and confident in his position than shifty-eyed Nixon ... Reagan in 1980 is prime ... Lloyd Bentsen scores the knock-out punch of the century in his reply to Dan Quayle in the 1988 VP debates ("you're no Jack Kennedy"), but Quayle was still elected VP on Bush the father's ticket.

I have no idea why the AP put in Bush the son's unremarkable segment from his 2004 debate with John Kerry, or why they piped in the dinky music under these clips. But they're still a nice compilation of debate history.

Will Obama land any blows like Bentsen's ... will he look as good as JFK against Nixon ... I'm looking forward to Friday.

Critics of Obama's Overseas Performance Have No Understanding of History or Rhetoric

Some responses to the criticism of Barack Obama that has followed his speech in Berlin last week. Summary: I think the criticisms all show a poor understanding of history, and the nature of politics, rhetoric, and fame.

1. Charles Krauthammer has been widely quoted as saying Obama didn't "earn" the right to speak in Berlin, as did JFK and Reagan.

My response: Speakers - whether Presidents or Presidential candidates, or anyone - don't "earn" the right to speak by their credentials beforehand. Rather, they are invited, if the host sees fit. And they may or may not attract a large audience. Obama attracted a huge audience of 200,000. By that measure, not to mention the audience's reaction, Obama eminently earned his right to speak in Berlin.

2. David Brooks is of the opinion that whereas JFK's and Reagan's speeches in Berlin consisted of rhetoric grounded in reality, Obama's was merely rhetoric.

My response: Really? How was JFK's "I am a Berliner" grounded in reality - last time I checked, JFK was an American, Washingtonian, New Englander, etc. In fact, that was classic rhetoric, taken from the ancient "I am a Roman." And Reagan's "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" was real in what way? Was that a serious threat or proposal? In the end, the wall was torn down by the Germans, not Mr. Gorbachev. JFK, Reagan, and Obama all used soaring rhetoric not grounded in reality. For that matter, so did Thomas Jefferson, Lincoln, both Roosevelts, and most great political speakers and writers.

3. And then we get to the McCain campaign's attempt to paint Obama as pursuing fame - you've no doubt seen the ad with Britney Spears and Paris Hilton on television and YouTube.

My response: Fame has forever been and always will be inextricably linked to politics in a democratic society, in which candidates get elected to office by the people. Reagan got elected Governor of California because people knew him as an actor, and the same of course is the case with the Terminator. The decisive point in evaluating candidates is not whether they use fame in their campaigns, but what ideas and plans they have for their state or nation if elected.

Barack Obama's ideas are far more original and appealing than John McCain's - and if Obama gives speeches that inspire millions of people, which his opponent is also incapable of, then so much the better.

Dems Rock Out on CNN in South Carolina: All Three Excellent, But Obama Scored Best

Well, all three of the Democratic candidates came out swinging in South Carolina on the CNN debate tonight, and it was a pleasure to see.

Especially for Barack Obama, who has needed to be more forceful in the debates. He took on Hillary about the attack on his statements that the Reagan Presidency was revolutionary - correctly pointing out that he didn't say he agreed with Reagan's ideas, but was pointing out that his Presidency had captured something in America which was "transformative". This is important for Democrats to understand, and Obama is right that he may be in the best position to do this. Obama also took on some of Bill Clinton's more outrageous attacks, saying he sometimes wasn't sure which Clinton he was running against.

But Hillary, for her part, gave another strong performance. Her finest moment came when she passionately said she wants all Americans to have health coverage. I actually agree with Obama's position on this more than Hillary's (Obama wants national-government health care to be voluntarily rather than mandatory on adults), but admire Hillary's passion on this issue.

And Edwards had one of his best nights, as well, pivoting from attacking Hillary to attacking Obama, and taking advantage of his not being party to their disagreements to appear the most statesmanlike.

So all three rose to the occasion tonight, and made me feel happy, once again, with the thought of any of the three in the White House.

But because a powerful debate from Obama was generally missing prior to tonight, and for the way he handled himself with grace and humor and style under attacks from both Clinton and Edwards, I'd give the debate tonight to Obama.