The arc of political change: David Mamet, Whittaker Chambers, Ronald Reagan

The New Neo Posted on by

Today the WSJ‘s Bari Weiss tackles playwright David Mamet’s political conversion from left to right . It’s an old story to readers of this blog, not just because such political conversions are a theme here, but because I’ve written before about Mamet’s change experience.

But a couple of new things struck me in the WSJ essay. The first was the fact that Mamet doesn’t appear to have been too badly ostracized by the Hollywood crowd (at least, not yet—or perhaps they need to stay in his good graces to get the chance to work with him):

When I [Weiss] meet the apostate [Mamet] in a loft in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, he’s wrapping up a production meeting. “Bye, bye, Bette!” he calls to the actress walking toward the elevator. That’d be Bette Midler. Al Pacino gets a bear hug. The two are starring in an upcoming HBO film about Phil Spector’s murder trial.

The second was the following observation by Ms. Weiss:

[Mamet] starts, naturally, with the most famous political convert in modern American history: Whittaker Chambers, whose 1952 book, “Witness,” documented his turn from Communism.

I admire Chambers’s book; I’ve recommended it on my right sidebar, in one of my Amazon widgets. I’ve read a goodly portion of it—which takes some doing since, although it’s fascinating, it’s a very lengthy tome.

But I’ve got to say that Chambers, once a household word, may not have such great name recognition at this point in time, except with history buffs, changers, and conservatives. And a sizable percentage of those who vaguely think they know who he is and what he did are probably getting him confused with Alger Hiss, the man he accused of being a Communist and who reacted by suing him for defamation in a notorious trial of the late 1940s.

I would argue that there has a been a far more famous American political changer since: none other than Ronald Reagan. Perhaps Ms. Weiss omitted him because it may not be all that well-known that he was a changer. But he was. The parallels to Mamet are actually more apt than to Chambers, because when he underwent his change, Reagan was in Hollywood (he’d even started out as a union guy):

When [Reagan] got to Hollywood as a young man in his twenties, he shared and was impressed by the general thinking of the good and sophisticated people of New York and Hollywood with regard to politics. He was a liberal Democrat, as his father was, and he felt a great attachment to the party. He was proud that his birth of a nation father had refused to take him and his brother Moon to the movie, Birth of a Nation, with its racial stereotypes. And he bragged that his father, Jack, a salesman, had, back long ago when Reagan was a kid, once spent the night in his car rather than sleep in a hotel that wouldn’t take Jews. Ronald Reagan as a young man was a Roosevelt supporter, he was all for FDR, and when he took part in his first presidential campaign he made speeches for Harry Truman in 1948.

When Reagan changed, it was against the tide. It might be said that the heyday of modern political liberalism, in its American manifestation, was the 1960s, when the Great Society began and the Kennedys were secular saints and the costs of enforced liberalism were not yet apparent. And that is precisely when Reagan came down hard right, all for Goldwater in 1964. This was very much the wrong side of the fashionable argument to be on; it wasn’t a way to gain friends in influential quarters, it wasn’t exactly a career-enhancing move. But Reagan thought the conservatives were right. So he joined them, at the least advantageous moment, the whole country going this way on a twenty-year experiment, and Reagan going that way, thinking he was right and thinking that sooner or later he and the country were going to meet in a historic rendezvous.

Far more historic, actually, than Chambers’s earlier notoriety.

But Chambers is not just a bit player in the story, because we learn that his book Witness had actually been highly influential in Reagan’s political change:

In 1952, Chambers’s book Witness was published to widespread acclaim. The book was a combination of autobiography and a warning about the dangers of Communism. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. called it one of the greatest of all American autobiographies, and Ronald Reagan credited the book as the inspiration behind his conversion from a New Deal Democrat to a conservative Republican.

In the (symbolic?) year of 1984, Reagan rewarded Chambers by honoring him with a posthumous Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award.

Change, it’s catching.

Zuckerberg and eating what you kill

The New Neo Posted on by

The news that 27-year-old Facebook founder and gazzillionaire Mark Zuckerberg has announced that he’ll only eat meat he personally kills has been food (pun intended) for jokes and puzzlement.

He’s been guided in his efforts by a Silicon Valley chef and neighbor of his with the improbable name of Jesse Cool:

Cool has introduced Zuckerberg to nearby farmers and advised him as he killed his first chicken, pig, and goat. “He cut the throat of the goat with a knife, which is the most kind way to do it,” says Cool.

So my first impression, which was that Zuckerberg had taken up hunting or at least raising his own animals for slaughter, is incorrect. It seems he merely administers the coup de grace, coming in at the last moment for the kill (literally).

This may seem like contrived showboating, but it’s actually a step up from those of us (myself most definitely included) who get our meat in packages at the supermarket and avoid all the messy stuff. I bet you’ve got some opinions about it all, especially those of you who hunt.

Those top ten beaches

The New Neo Posted on by

In my continuing effort to get into a summer holiday mood this weekend, I am posting a link to Dr. Beach’s list of top ten sandy ocean spots. It’s heavy on the Hawaiian venues, but it also includes one in Cape Cod and another on Long Island that I think I’ve been to in the past.

It doesn’t surprise me that Hawaii would trump New England. I’ve never been to the former, alas, although I’ve heard enough about it to think I really ought to go some day. But I’m very familiar with the beaches in New England. They are beautiful and plentiful, and some of them are even places where you might want to get into the water and swim—if you’re exceptionally hardy, that is, and from Canada.

That’s a bit of an exaggeration, of course. Southern (or at least southernish) New England—Block Island in Rhode Island, for example, and parts of Cape Cod—are swimmable in the summer. New Hampshire is sort of on the cusp. But Maine, even the southern part, is not a place for the weak or faint of heart. The water is cold, and suited only to very young and very active local children, who seem impervious to such things, and the aforementioned Canadians, who swarm there in great numbers. To them, these are tropical waters.

When my son was about four years old, a friend of mine came to visit from New York City with her four-year-old. It was summer and it was hot—really really really hot, over 100 degrees. What better place could there be to go than the beach? Unfortunately, the wind must have been blowing the wrong way, because it was just as hot there as it was inland, and you couldn’t step on the sand without footwear or you risked instant burns.

But it was early in the season and the water was still so cold it was almost unendurable—even if you merely dunked your toes in, it was instant freeze-up. My friend’s four-year-old daughter began wailing.

“It’s too hot and then it’s too cold!” she shrieked. “I want to go home!” It was difficult to argue with that; the kid had a point, and we bailed pretty quickly.

It occurs to me that this post might be construed as meant to discourage New England tourism. Hardly. It’s one of the most beautiful, charming, historical areas of the United States. But don’t come expecting to swim in its oceans in June. Unless you’re from Labrador, stick to the lighthouses.

Speaking about the 2012 election…and the weather

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m tired of reading those polls telling us how all the Republicans in the field are doing against each other.

First of all, we may not even have the full field yet. Second of all, the lesser-known names on the list have not built up their constituencies yet. Third of all, all sorts of things will change and change and change. And fourth of all, there are so many entrants that even the so-called front-runners (Romney at present) don’t have anywhere near a majority.

It’s just so much blah-blah-blah at this point, even more than usual. But what else are pundits to do in a slow season?

I’m always kind of glad when the news is slow, even though it gives me less to think about and less to write about. But slow news is good news most of the time, because most news is not of the feel-good variety. What’s more, New England has finally decided to stop pretending it’s Seattle in the winter and has started impersonating North Carolina in the spring. We’ve got a three-day weekend coming; let’s hear it for slow news and fine weather!

Spambot of the day

The New Neo Posted on by

Spambot who clearly has mistaken me for someone else:

Keep posting dude. nice. Therefore do not make any tattoo on your body with any tattoo pictures, you must choose the tattoo that suits you and your body.

I’ll take it under advisement.

Vermont: on the road to single-payer health insurance?

The New Neo Posted on by

Tiny Vermont is probably the most leftist state in the union.

Like many other New England states, it has a mix of old-time residents and their offspring, who tend to be more conservative, and relatively new arrivals (“new” in New England meaning anyone who arrived during the past 70 years) “from away,” who tend to be very liberal.

Like other New England states except for Massachusetts (population 6.6 million; see this for all states) and Connecticut (3.5 million), it has a tiny population. Maine is big in geography but only has about 1.3 million people, as does geographically smallish New Hampshire, and diminuitive Rhode Island has about a million. But Vermont, with about the same square mileage as New Hampshire, has half the people, with a population of about 625,000. That’s only about the size of a medium-large city, although Vermont is decidedly rural. Its biggest city, Burlington, hardly even qualifies for urban designation at all at 42,000 people.

So whatever health care solutions Vermont comes up with, it will be difficult to extrapolate the results to the rest of the country, except perhaps for others of its ilk in the bottom tier of population (although their populations tend to be far more conservative than Vermont’s, such as that of Alaska and Wyoming).

That’s one of the reasons that federalism is a good idea. States are free to experiment with health care insurance systems for their residents. And Vermont has done just that, taking a step described as being on the road to a single-payer system.

I’m not so sure that’s so. Take a look for yourself:

Legislators say the plan, approved by the Democratic controlled House and Senate this spring, aims to extend coverage to all 620,000 residents while containing soaring health care costs.

A key component establishes a state health benefits exchange, as mandated by new federal health care laws, that will offer coverage from private insurers, state-sponsored and multi-state plans. It also will include tax credits to make premiums affordable for uninsured Vermonters.

Private insurers are included there rather than single payer. But the goal is certainly eventual single-payer, and in the next few years rather than later:

The exchange, called Green Mountain Care and managed by a five-member board, will set reimbursement rates for health care providers and streamline administration into a single, unified system…As designed, the goal is an eventual state-funded and operated single-payer system.

There are a number of things that have to happen first, however, and they could represent big speedbumps or even roadblocks along the way. Vermont has to make a good case (the word the article uses is “ensure,” whatever that might involve) that the new plan will be cheaper than the old. Of course, we’ve learned that’s not all that hard to do by making sanguine assumptions that are unproven. The state also must ultimately get a federal waiver from Obamacare in order to institute single payer, assuming Obamacare is still around by 2017.

I mentioned that Vermont is loaded with recent immigrants “from away.” One of them is Dr. Deb Richter, who moved to Vermont from Buffalo NY in 1999 for the express purpose of pushing single payer health insurance. She had found the atmosphere in New York state to be unreceptive, and correctly surmised that the idea might encounter more fertile soil in leftist Vermont.

Certain Vermonters of the Republican persuasion aren’t too happy about that:

John McClaughry, a former Republican state senator who is against the new law, said Dr. Richter meant well but did not understand the “long-term damage” it would wreak. In particular, he said the law would drive away businesses that did not want to help pay for it.

Businesses? Vermont?? The state is not known for its welcoming business atmosphere to begin with. For example, it was ranked as number 45 out of 50 states by Forbes in 2010. For comparison, note that New Hampshire, its more business-friendly twin, was number 19, and behemoth Massachusetts was 16. But Vermont needn’t be ashamed before most of its fellow New England states—Connecticut was 36, and Rhode Island and Maine brought up the rear at numbers 49 and 50, respectively.

Ed Schultz channels Dan Ackroyd

The New Neo Posted on by

There is no question in my mind that, whether Ed Schultz is aware of it or not, that’s what was happening when he called Laura Ingraham a “right-wing slut.”

Part of the humor of the old SNL bit was that this sort of insult was so over-the-top at the time. Broadcasters and pundits were far more polite back then, despite whatever seething anger they might be harboring. Nowadays, of course, the seething anger bubbles over freely, and insults such as the one Schultz directed at Ingraham would have been considered mild if they had been directed at Sarah Palin. The surprise is not that Schultz said it in the first place, but that he received any sort of slap on the wrist for it and felt the need to issue an apology.

Dance me to the end of the Leonard Cohen video

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve finally located a certain video, discovered while I was at YouTube engaged in one of my favorite activities: procrastination by chain-viewing.

You know what chain-viewing is. You watch a video, and then plan to click on just one more on the list of related videos to the right, but find yourself clicking on another and another and another. Later, when you finally come to, you discover that several hours have sped by with nothing to show for them but a bunch of tenacious earworms.

I thought I’d share at least one of those earworms with you, dear readers, because what I finally found was the Leonard Cohen video of “Dance Me to the End of Love,” the one that had gone sadly missing around about the time I first discussed it four years ago in this post about my love affair (of the virtual variety) with the singer-songwriter:

[The video] featured Cohen standing in front of a screen showing couples’ wedding pictures from long ago, and then those very same couples, elderly and nearly unrecognizable as themselves but still dancing together slowly as he sang the haunting, beautiful tune.

When you watch it, please do your best to ignore the young yuppie-ish couple who begin the piece and appear intermittently in it, trying to look natural and failing utterly. They’re obviously actors or even (perish the thought!) models, much better suited to the world of advertisements for kitchen appliances and real estate than the lugubrious yearnings of Cohen. The older couples in the video, on the other hand, are quite clearly the real deal, and almost indescribably touching.

And please please please do try to ignore the flying/floating/burning violin (literal images=not a good idea).

As for the “double your pleasure double your fun” brunette singing twins—well, I’m not sure about them, but I’m certain that some viewers (especially of the male persuasion) may like them very much indeed.

Raise a tent of shelter now, though every thread is torn…

Learning from the NY-26 special election

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s bad news that Democrat Kathy Hochul defeated Republican Jane Corwin in a special election in a NY district that is traditionally Republican. But let’s be careful not to generalize too much about it—although the MSM certainly will, and all in the direction of Democrat cheerleading and chest-thumping.

The first thing that leapt out at me on reading the results was that Hochul benefited from the presence of a “Tea Party” challenger Jack Davis who got 9% of the vote. I place Davis’s Tea Party designation in quotes because he was apparently one of those astroturf Tea Party candidates, and so it’s not completely clear where his votes came from in the end, but the consensus is that it was Corwin his presence hurt.

Another thing that is apparent is that turnout was low, as is so often the case in special elections. This favors organizational ability and motivation. The Republicans did not get their act together to energize their voters to go to the polls.

In addition, the Democrats capitalized on confusion and a scare campaign of their own about the Republican proposals on Medicare. Expect to see much more of that in 2012, and Republicans had better have a more effective response.

I’m with William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection, who notes all of that, and more. And Doug Mataconis at Outside the Beltway adds this:

It’s also worth noting that Republicans lost a special election in another upstate New York Congressional District in 2009. A year later, they took control of the House of Representatives.

There may be something especially special about New York state special elections that ends up favoring Democrats. But if so, I can’t quite think what it would be.

[ADDENDUM: I found some possible answers here. Take a look at the first few comments, which say, among other things, that the NY Republican Party is “sclerotic,” and that it can’t “find it’s own behind with both hands and a flashlight.”

Perhaps there really is something especially special about NY Republicans—although come to think of it, those descriptions needn’t be confined to Republicans in that state alone.]

Obama: time stopped in 2008

The New Neo Posted on by

Or something like that.

2008 was a mighty big year for him, so perhaps he feels that time stopped then. I must confess that something similar happened to me. For a few years after I gave birth to my son, I had to fight the urge to date checks the year he was born, when life as I had previously known it changed so very much.

But checks are one thing, and signing ceremonial guestbooks at Westminster Abby as President another. Anyone and everyone makes mistakes, but Obama seems to make the oddest ones. Come on: 2008? 57 states? corpse-man?

More on that Republican field vs. Obama

The New Neo Posted on by

So now Giuliani is thinking about entering the race.

Forgive me if I yawn; another big ho-hum. Giuliani’s time was last time, and he lost momentum, partly because he just didn’t seem to want it. If he enters now, it’s an afterthought.

It strikes me that Obama is exceptionally lucky in his opponents. There is no question in my mind that he would be extremely vulnerable in 2012 to a strong candidate, but it’s not at all certain that such a candidate will enter the fray. This has been Obama’s pattern for his entire political career, with a single exception (the only election he ever lost): the primary in which he ran against the popular US Congressman Bobby Rush and was roundly defeated. As Bobby Rush said:

He was blinded by his ambition…Obama has never suffered from a lack of believing that he can accomplish whatever it is he decides to try. Obama believes in Obama.

Yes.

It was the first and only time (except for the presidential race of 2008) that Obama had a bona fide opponent. In his earlier primary race (the Democratic primaries are the real battle in the Chicago districts where Obama first cut his political teeth) he managed to use legal shenanigans to disqualify the entire field and ran unopposed (see this if you’re unfamiliar with the story—it’s a lulu). After the Rush interlude, from which Obama learned how vulnerable he could be, his opponents in his Senate campaign (both Republican and Democrat) mysteriously collapsed in response to the unveiling of previously-sealed records that showed their private lives in a bad light.

I’ve written about this phenomenon previously, but it bears repeating:

…[I]t later came out that Obama’s campaign was directly involved in what the press did to torpedo Hull’s chances (and lest you accuse me of right-wing extremism, please note that the link and quote is from the NY Times):

[Obama’s campaign manager] Axelrod is known for operating in this gray area, part idealist, part hired muscle. It is difficult to discuss Axelrod in certain circles in Chicago without the matter of the Blair Hull divorce papers coming up. As the 2004 Senate primary neared, it was clear that it was a contest between two people: the millionaire liberal, Hull, who was leading in the polls, and Obama, who had built an impressive grass-roots campaign. About a month before the vote, The Chicago Tribune revealed, near the bottom of a long profile of Hull, that during a divorce proceeding, Hull’s second wife filed for an order of protection. In the following few days, the matter erupted into a full-fledged scandal that ended up destroying the Hull campaign and handing Obama an easy primary victory. The Tribune reporter who wrote the original piece later acknowledged in print that the Obama camp had “worked aggressively behind the scenes” to push the story. But there are those in Chicago who believe that Axelrod had an even more significant role ”” that he leaked the initial story.

And then there’s the matter of Obama’s next opponent, Jack Ryan, to whom the same thing happened. I must be careful here; there is documentation that Obama’s staff pushed and promoted the Hull revelations by the press, but there is no evidence so far of the same involvement occurring with the Ryan outing. However, unless it’s a strange coincidence (always a possibility), it is mighty suspicious; Obama’s staff certainly had the tools, the connections, the motivation, and the experience.

Here’s a discussion of Axelrod’s modus operandi, which may sound familiar:

What kind of campaign can we expect from Axelrod in the general election? Overtly positive themes and public posturing complemented by covertly delievered and mercilessly negative “stiletto” attacks against key people around John McCain that are not directly traceable to Axelrod. The model for this strategy is the previous Obama senatorial campaign in Illinois, where Obama’s two most formidible, centimillionaire, rivals, Democrat Blair Hull and Republican Jack Ryan were personally destroyed in the primaries when salacious details from their sealed divorce records were mysteriously leaked to the media, which then pressured for their full release, notably in the pages of the Chicago Tribune.

So Obama’s previous good luck seems to have been some combination of dirty tricks on his part and actual good luck. It’s unclear what the ratio of the first to the second was; suffice to say there was a goodly amount of each.

Which brings us to the present. The relative weakness of the Republican field may be an accident. Or it may be fear of the smear machine keeping the stronger candidates away. Everyone has something in his or her past that could lead to trouble if the harsh and partisan spotlight of the media were turned on it. But Obama, who’s got plenty of skeletons in his closet, feels immune. He knows the MSM has always covered for him, doing the opposite of what it does to his opponents.

Get ready, folks. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

Obama gets more flak on Israel…

The New Neo Posted on by

…some of it from expected sources, and some of it from unexpected ones.

Harry Reid’s “rebuke” of Obama seems relatively mild to me, however, although the AIPAC crowd seemed to like it. Was Reid merely playing good cop to Obama’s bad?

I continue to think that none of this will hurt Obama with the vast majority of Democratic voters. Nothing seems to.

But one thing everyone on left, right, or in-between needs to realize: all bets are off after Obama is elected to a second term, should that undesirable event occur. Whatever statements, promises, or assurances he has given previously to whatever interest group, no one should feel that his word has any meaning whatsoever. He will have cast off the need to appeal to any constituency save himself.