Okay, let’s play identity politics: a Ted Cruz friendship that should be publicized

The New Neo Posted on by

The hype on Ted Cruz is that nobody likes him, everybody hates him, he has no friends.

The hype on Republicans is that they’re racist bigots.

Here’s a story that could kill (or at least slightly injure) those two birds with one stone: the tale of Ted Cruz’s best friend in college, law school, and beyond, David Panton.

I first became aware of Panton on reading about this interview with Harvard Law’s Alan Dershowitz, which is fascinating in its own right:

Alan Dershowitz, an emeritus professor at Harvard Law School, confirmed for Megyn Kelly during an appearance on Tuesday’s Kelly File that Ted Cruz was one of the smartest students he ever had. Dershowitz said teachers love to be challenged. And Cruz disagreed with everything he said and made such brilliant arguments that Dershowitz never had to play the devil’s advocate.

Dershowitz also admitted he took a lot of criticism from his lefty friends for being truthful about Cruz. He also told Kelly that Cruz’s politics were the opposite of Dershowitz’, but they were clear, principled, unwavering, and very intelligently presented.

Dershowitz is to be commended for that sort of courage, which he’s shown many times before in taking positions that are unpopular with his fellow liberals.

Here’s how Dershowitz brought up the topic of Cruz’s friendship with Panton:

[Cruz] had been a champion debater at Princeton and he and his Princeton roommate sat next to each other, and he was an African-American, a black kid from Jamaica, two of the most brilliant guys at Harvard Law school. And they were inseparable. And they had a team tag match. One guy finished, the other guy would raise his hand.

Here’s a photo from way back when:

panton

This was not just a passing thing or a token friendship, either; it seems like the real deal. The two have remained friends to the present day:

David Panton and Ted Cruz have been friends for the last 25 years, they attended one of the most prestigious universities at young ages, 17 and 20, and have since maintained a bond. Ted was like a lightning rod for controversy and a stickler for process and was disliked by many of his classmates until his friendship with the popular and extremely likeable Jamaican.

They became debate partners and roommates for the rest of their time at Princeton and continued when they went to Harvard Law School, winning the North American Championship in 1992 and becoming the top two debaters in the country. They both participated in political studies. Resulting from their close friendship, they became business partners. Cruz has made numerous visits to the island. Panton became Cruz’s best man at his wedding, whilst Cruz became godfather to Panton’s son with Lisa Hanna.

Note that “popular and extremely likeable” description of Panton. Interesting that he chose Cruz to be so close to. Here’s some more about Panton, who sounds like a pretty extraordinary person:

His brilliance as a Rhodes Scholar, which he received a doctorate in management studies from Oxford University, the youngest of his undergrad class, and among the youngest holders of a PhD from Oxford. He must be in the top 20 most brilliant Jamaican of all times, maybe not too far for the legendary Monsignor Wilson, who ranked sixth in the world in the 60s for brilliance. At Harvard Law School he became one of two black presidents in the history of Harvard Law Review, the other being President Obama.

There’s much more here. An excerpt:

The two were teenagers when they first met, assigned to live in the same freshman dorm at Princeton. They were an “unlikely couple,” Panton said last year to a radio station in Atlanta, where he now lives. Cruz was a deeply conservative Hispanic from a poor background while Panton, who is black, hailed from the upper crust of Jamaican society, where his father ran one of the island’s largest companies.

“Coming from a small school in a small town in Jamaica, I was young and felt both academically and culturally overwhelmed,” Panton told The Washington Post. “Ted was extremely pleasant and friendly and expressed genuine interest in my background.”

Cruz and Panton shared the love of a good argument and decided together to join Princeton’s competitive debate team, he said. Some classmates were baffled by the relationship between two people with seemingly opposite personalities. Panton, with his lilting Jamaican accent, exuded charm and made friends easily. Cruz was combative, developed few friendships and earned some lifelong enemies…

Panton said that over movies, video games and basketball, he saw another side of Cruz. “I am always surprised and perplexed by those who said they did not like Ted,” he said.

Panton’s Jamaican home played an important role in the relationship. Panton invited Cruz and Adam Erlich, a friend and fellow debater, to visit his family on the island…

When Panton was elected to become the president of the Harvard Law Review, the first person he called was—Ted Cruz.

Obama’s legacy

The New Neo Posted on by

I concur with this prediction:

There will be no liberation of Mosul in 2016. The Islamic State will outlive the U.S. administration whose lapses in Syria and Iraq helped to create it. It will be the ugliest piece of Barack Obama’s legacy.

Except perhaps for that last line.

I’m not sure it’s the “ugliest piece,” but only because there are so many ugly pieces.

How goes Indiana?

The New Neo Posted on by

The state of Indiana has a primary on May 3, and most analysts feel it will be pivotal in terms of the GOP nomination (and Ted Cruz knows it). But all that speculation about which way the state will go is based on almost no polling data at all.

So the pundits have no idea. And we have no idea, either. You may distrust polls; sometimes they are off, but they’re usually not very far off, and their information has been very useful in making general predictions about the basic trends in a state. Anyone here from Indiana who can shed some light on the situation there?

Naked lunch

The New Neo Posted on by

And dinner too.

For real.

[NOTE: If you don’t get the reference in the title of this post, see this, although I most definitely do not recommend the book, unless you want to wade through some incoherent but highly-praised depravity.]

Comparing throws in “Dances at a Gathering”

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve written about the 1969 ballet “Dances At a Gathering” several times, and mentioned that I find today’s dancers, for all their fabulous technique, lacking the musicality and artistry of the past. A part of the ballet features certain lifts/throws that live on in my memory as some of the most thrilling things I’ve ever seen in all my long years of ballet-going.

Here’s a clip of a version done by the Paris Opera that seems flat and flawed to me. I’ve cued it up to the point right before one of these throws, followed by another even more spectacular one, a moment in the ballet that never fails to win enthusiastic applause. I’m not saying these movements are not competently performed in this video; these are certainly good dancers. Good, but that’s all—although if you didn’t see the original you might think I’m being a carping curmudgeon to complain. But to me these throws seem restrained and tight, with none of the wild abandon I recall:

I’m happy to report that the next video is more like it. It’s a performance by the New York City Ballet, the company on whom the ballet was first choreographed by Jerome Robbins, and whose original cast is the one I remember. This is not that cast, but it conjures up something much closer to the effect I remember:

When I saw it in person—in the depth of three dimensions rather than the two of a small computer screen—nearly fifty years ago (and I saw it at least five times), the audience used to gasp with a combination of fear, awe, and delight at the simultaneous riskiness and beauty of the move.

A few more post-NY-primary thoughts

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an interesting article at RedState that crunches the delegate numbers and finds that it still won’t be easy for Trump to win the GOP nomination on the first convention ballot. I’m not at all sure about any of these projections (pro or con Trump, it doesn’t matter which) because there are too many unknowns. But this one makes enough sense that it should cheer at least a few of you up, at least a little bit.

I also have noticed the argument that, if the convention goes to a second ballot and Trump the frontrunner doesn’t win, many or even most of his supporters will be so angry they won’t vote for the eventual nominee no matter who he is (and for some, especially if he’s Ted Cruz). While that certainly seems true to me, I don’t think it matters all that much for the simple reason that I don’t think many or most of them were going to vote for the eventual nominee anyway if it wasn’t Trump. The reasons vary from person to person, but here are a few possibilities: they aren’t people who usually vote, and only Trump brought them into the political fray; they are activists who are dedicated to the destruction of the GOP; they are “the base” but are very very angry at the entire GOP and will only support Trump, because all the rest are tainted as far as they’re concerned; they are liberal Republicans who will not vote for a conservative; they believe the constant drumbeat of negative publicity about “lyin’ Ted”; they don’t like Ted Cruz’s face or his voice or his religious beliefs.

The Republican Party has been divided for many years now, and the division reached a fever pitch during and after the 2012 election. I’ve watched it and tracked it, and it’s only grown ever since (with a little blip for the hope represented by the 2014 mid-term election). Trump (helped by the activist alt-right) is a magnet for this emotion—a magnet that has not only attracted the feeling, but has purposely amplified it for his own purposes.

New York primary: if Trump can make it there…

The New Neo Posted on by

…can he make it everywhere?

In other words, what is the significance of Donald Trump’s yuuge win in his home state?

He was expected to win, and win big. That was already factored into projections about his final vote total on the first ballot at the convention, and those predictions have been that he had a good chance of falling a bit short. However, yesterday Trump won even bigger in NY than the polls had predicted, and gets a few more delegates than was expected. That may or may not matter.

Kasich and Cruz did about as expected, with Cruz doing very poorly. New York is not Cruz’s natural territory at all, and he didn’t help himself with his “New York values” statement many months ago. Even though he was quoting Donald Trump, Cruz’s remarks were clumsily phrased and unclear—and ripe for exploitation by Trump, and that’s what happened. But even without those remarks, I don’t think Cruz would ever have done well in NY. And even if Kasich had bowed out and it had been a 2-person race there, I still think that Trump would have garnered all or nearly all of New York’s GOP delegates.

Which brings us to the question of who are these New York GOP voters, and what is their political philosophy? Michael Barone describes them this way:

New York has always believed in commerce and in tolerance, but has had little use for principle. Like Amsterdam in the age of Rembrandt, it is the greatest trading and finance system in the world, with a taste for high art and low life. In New York you are considered “old money” if you have held your fortune for 10 minutes…

It’s a city that, like its son Donald Trump, loves winners — winners like the New York Yankees, hated in much of America but loved in New York. Longtime Yankees owner George Steinbrenner and on-and-off manager Billy Martin may have been brash and boorish, but they were loved in New York. Hey, they were winners.

Trump speaks in the accents and cadences of New York — not of the ancestral rich in Manhattan but in the upward strivers and figure-out-the-angles rich of the outer boroughs and Long Island suburbs…

Only 23 percent of New York state voters are registered Republicans…

In a quick search just now I couldn’t find any statistics on some hard facts about New York’s GOP voters, but I have long noted that victorious GOP politicians in New York (no, that’s not an oxymoron) tend not to be what we’d call conservatives. For example, the city of New York has sometimes had Republican mayors, but those mayors have been far from conservative (Bloomberg, Giuliani, Lindsay).

There have always been more Republicans upstate than in the city, but in recent years they have very rarely been able to overcome the NYC advantage and elect a statewide Republican. In fact, New York has elected only three GOP governors since 1923: Thomas Dewey, Nelson Rockefeller, and George Pataki. Dewey “led the moderate or progressive faction of the Republican Party.” Rockefeller was the quintessential moderate Republican in the same mold. Pataki was more of a mixed bag, but in this year’s primary he endorsed Kasich, which tells us something (and might be one of the reasons for Kasich’s relatively strong showing there).

In the 70s there was one conservative Republican senator from New York, James L. Buckley (William F.’s brother), who was elected (with only 38.7 of the vote) for one term as somewhat of a fluke in a six-candidate race where the liberal GOP vote was split. Jacob Javits, a GOP senator from NY from 1957-1981, was another liberal. Alphonse D’Amato has the distinction of having been New York’s last GOP senator (1981-1999), initially elected because of another split between two liberal candidates, but re-elected after that despite his relative conservatism. But he was an anomaly, and IMHO the end of a rather short line.

So I think we can safely say that New York’s Republicans are not conservatives and were never voting for Cruz in anything but very small numbers. This can probably be said for much of the Northeast GOP: not only has Trump done very well there (and not just in New York), but Kasich has come in second quite reliably. This has been true in Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire, all of which have already voted. Maine was the anomaly; it went for Cruz, but that was in a caucus and it’s not at all clear whether Cruz would done nearly as well in a primary. You can see exactly the same “Trump, then Kasich” trend in Connecticut polls.

I’m not going to keep going with this, because I think you get the idea: the northeast GOP has not been conservative for a long, long time, and is not especially interested in Cruz. Cruz’s strength in other states that have yet to vote in their primaries is not such that he could ever win on a first ballot. His chances depend on Trump losing on a first ballot—which still could happen. But let’s not kid ourselves; it seems less likely after last night, because there’s something about momentum that is real, and Trump is going to seem a bit more inevitable (although not actually in fact inevitable) after that New York vote.

It seems ironic to me that it comes down to this, after such a promising beginning to the primary season. Ironic and depressing, because of my oft-stated opinion about Trump. I also think Trump has no chance of winning in a general election against Hillary Clinton (whose nomination has always seemed inevitable to me), and Cruz has a better chance but not a great one. On the other hand, I think Rubio could and would have beaten her. Maybe even Kasich could beat her, strangely enough. I’ve written about both before, and am not getting into their merits or demerits in this post, but feel strongly that either would have been a better president than either Trump or Clinton.

And that’s where we stand today. I have no idea if Trump will win on that first ballot, but I give him a better-than-even chance. And I believe that will lead to Hillary Clinton being the next US president. I also believe the entire situation is abysmal.

[NOTE: I also predict that if nominated, Trump will lose New York in the general to Hillary. By the way, this was my 2012 prediction about Hillary’s chances in 2016.]

[ADDENDUM: John Podhoretz is even more pessimistic than I am.]

Yeah, it’s New York primary day

The New Neo Posted on by

[UPDATE below]

You wanna make something of it?

I’m not expecting a fun result. The real question is how big Trump’s margin will be, and how the various districts will go.

Here’s an open thread to discuss it all.

UPDATE 10:55 PM

All the returns are not in yet, but it’s shaping up to be a very bad evening for those of us who think a Trump nomination would be a disaster. As expected, Trump was strong overall, but it’s the district breakdowns that were the big unknowns. FiveThirtyEight projects at the moment that Trump will get 91 delegates to Kasich’s 4, and Cruz none (it’s changing slightly even as I write, as more returns come in, but that’s the general picture). Cruz has always been weak in NY, but I had thought Kasich might pull out a few more delegates than that. This is the sort of result I have been dreading for quite some time.

Hillary has done very well, too, as expected.

On Rush Limbaugh

The New Neo Posted on by

In comment after comment around the blogosphere, I’ve noticed quite a few Rush Limbaugh’s fans saying that they’re incredibly disappointed in him for his coverage of the 2016 primary, and have abandoned him and his show. Some of them were lifelong (or at least decades-long) listeners.

I’m not a listener. I don’t like talk shows in general and very rarely tune in to Rush or anyone else, probably because I’d much rather read my information than hear it. I get impatient and easily bored with the slow pace of talk compared to reading. With reading I can pace myself—pay more attention to the items that interest me most, skim the others, and go fast or slow as I wish. With talk shows, other people set the rhythm, and the pace usually doesn’t feel right to me. Plus, I find that talk shows usually are more about the personality of the speaker than the issues.

So I’m hardly the best person to opine on whether Rush Limbaugh has been fair this season—whether he’s in the tank for Trump or not, or a betrayer of conservatism or not—although over the years I’ve become somewhat familiar with his show (and the shows of all the major radio hosts on the right) from listening for a few minutes or a half hour or so now and then to get a general feel for the style and message. What I really think about talk show hosts (not just Limbaugh, by any means) is that they are first and foremost in the business of getting ratings. And what pumps up ratings is not sober, intellectual analysis and evenhanded evaluation, it’s the spice of sensationalism, anger, accusations, humor, controversy, and cleverness. Talk shows are a business, and although the topic may be politics, business is business.

So I’m rather surprised that so many people seem so surprised at whatever it is that Rush Limbaugh is doing, or what they perceive him to be doing. For an example of what that might be, and how his disappointed ex-fans see him now, please read this post and some of the ensuing comments. In the incident being discussed there, Limbaugh apparently described Trump as having lied about what happened in the selection process of the delegates in Colorado, but added that the lie was planned in advance and effective, and therefore a “brilliant” populist move of Trump’s to fool and manipulate voters/supporters (that’s a paraphrase by me, not Rush’s actual words—for the actual quotes, go to the link).

Some people—the Rush defenders—are saying that doesn’t mean Limbaugh was praising that behavior of Trump’s, just that he was exposing it and explaining it. Others—the Rush critics—said that Limbaugh was saying the behavior was fine because it’s the way for Trump to win, and that this whole season Limbaugh has been defending whatever Trump has done in the guise of “explaining” him.

I was also surprised that neither the name “Machiavelli” nor the adjective “Machiavellian” has popped up in any of the discussions I’ve seen on the subject, because it seems to me that Limbaugh, by using words like “brilliant” to refer to Trump’s supposed strategy of losing in order to “win” through a bald-faced lie about what happened in Colorado, was using the word “brilliant” in the Machiavellian sense. And that brings up an old old quandry: how immoral can, or should, a politician be before he or she has crossed a line that means he/she should be roundly condemned?

That seems to me to be the heart of the matter. Is it wrong to purposely plan to lie like that (if you accept Limbaugh’s theory about Trump’s motive, which I don’t)—particularly about an opponent in your own party—in order to stir up populist anger in your favor? If Limbaugh is describing this in a neutral manner, doesn’t he have a duty to say whether it’s right or wrong, good or bad, in more than the pragmatic sense? In addition, how about the harm such a “winning” strategy might do to the conservative cause, and even to Trump’s manipulated and misled followers—in other words, to everyone except Donald Trump?

To me, that’s the biggest failing in Limbaugh—his lack of a moral judgment on what he says Trump is doing. Whether he thinks it’s perfectly fine, or whether he thinks it’s something a candidate shouldn’t do, he should make himself clear and not pretend the action has no moral valence.

Here’s a comment at that same RedState post that points out this problem:

Rush used to mock liberals who marveled at the brilliance of Bill Clinton’s lying. Rush has never been “neutral” with liars in previous campaigns.

I’ve not listened to Limbaugh enough to know whether that’s true, but I suspect it is (and other commenters in the thread said as much). I’m not naive; lying is certainly something that goes hand in hand with politics, but there are degrees of lies, seriousness of lies, types of lies, and targets of lies, and some lies are much worse than others. Being neutral and merely describing a lying technique and praising it as you do so seems to be a bit Machiavellian on Rush’s part, too:

Machiavelli believed that public and private morality had to be understood as two different things in order to rule well. As a result, a ruler must be concerned not only with reputation, but also must be positively willing to act immorally at the right times. As a political theorist, Machiavelli emphasized the occasional need for the methodical exercise of brute force or deceit including extermination of entire noble families to head off any chance of a challenge to the prince’s authority.

Scholars often note that Machiavelli glorifies instrumentality in statebuilding, an approach embodied by the saying “The ends justify the means.”

The right used to be fond of saying that such an “ends justifies the means” philosophy was one of the things that was wrong with the left. Yet it seems to be a universally appealing one—doesn’t it?—because many on the right appear to be embracing it these days.

[NOTE: I’ve written about Limbaugh before, here and here.]

When do you need a tetanus booster?

The New Neo Posted on by

I have to say this is not a question I’ve thought about in recent decades: do you need a tetanus booster every 10 years or will every 30 suffice? Evidence now indicates that 30-year intervals might do nicely, but I am almost certain it’s been more than thirty years since I’ve had mine. Then again, I don’t walk barefoot outside anymore, for what it’s worth.

On the other hand, about forty years ago I was in Costa Rica, running in sandaled feet for a ferry that was about to leave the dock without me, and I tripped a little bit (or my sandals tripped me). As a result, I sustained a nasty scrape/puncture on some very rough pavement and stones. I did catch the ferry, which led me to a place called Jesusita (then very rustic), and I had time to mull over whether my lack of a recent tetanus booster would predispose me to getting the disease.

I survived without the booster, but when I got home I made sure I got the shot. That was the last time, though. The subject just hasn’t been on my mind since. And you?

Ukraine’s new Prime Minister…

The New Neo Posted on by

…is Jewish:

The Jewish speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, Volodymyr Groysman, has been elected prime minister after a months-long political crisis.

The parliament on Thursday voted 250-57 for Groysman, who was nominated by President Petro Poroshenko.

The outgoing prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, resigned earlier this week after weeks of pressure for him to step down. He had survived a no-confidence vote in February.

Groysman has been perceived as a conciliatory figure after the governing coalition refused to support U.S.-born Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko, who has been lauded as a West-friendly reformist untainted by cronyism and corruption.

Speaking ahead of the vote, Groysman said his government was committed to tackling graft and strengthening ties with the European Union.”I understand the threats that face us. In particular I would like to highlight three threats – corruption, ineffective governance and populism, which do not pose less of a threat than the enemy in eastern Ukraine,” he said, referring to a pro-Russian separatist rising.”I will show you what leading a country really means,” he added.

I have no idea whether Groysman will be able to stem corruption and “ineffective governance.” If he succeeds, however, that would make him a very unusual person. I’m not at all sure what he’s talking about when he says that “populism” is a threat—does it translate from Ukrainian to the same word here, with all its ramifications? Nor am I particularly conversant with Ukrainian politics or Ukrainian issues, other than the very obvious difficulties they’ve had with Russia. So I can’t really comment on the merits of Groysman’s taking on the office, or whether he will be a success.

But an elected Jewish leader of any country other than Israel is unusual, to say the least. It is even more striking in a country such as Ukraine, which has a very lengthy and complex history with its Jews. No doubt you’ve met Jews in this country whose ancestors are said to be “from Russia,” but that’s more likely than not a shorthand for “from Ukraine.”

Jews in Ukraine have a lengthy history:

Jewish communities have existed in the territory of Ukraine from the time of Kievan Rus’ [882-1240] and developed many of the most distinctive modern Jewish theological and cultural traditions…According to the World Jewish Congress, the Jewish community in Ukraine constitute the third biggest Jewish community in Europe and the fifth biggest in the world.

In the 1800s and well into the 1900s, pogroms that murdered up to 50 thousand Jews occurred in Ukraine, where the blood libels was very active. But that violence paled in comparison to what the Nazis did there—it was the home of the famous Einsatzgruppen slaughters in which over a million Jews were shot in western Ukraine by the Nazis, with the cooperation of some of the locals. That reduced Ukraine’s Jewish population by about 70%, and the number of Jews there was further reduced when Communists persecuted much of the remainder, many of whom emigrated.

But quite a few remained, among them the ancestors of the youngish (38) Groysman, an entrepreneur who was previously city councilor and mayor of Vinnytsia, a member of Parliament, and then chairman of Parliament. I find his election as prime minister an encouraging sign that anti-Semitism has probably declined in that country recently. In much of Europe—and the world—it seems to be doing quite the opposite.