If you’re not a leftist, why vote Democrat in 2012?

The New Neo Posted on by

Dennis Prager asks the question.

He’s got a few more things to say:

For many non-leftist Democrats, it is emotionally impossible to vote Republican.

I can illustrate this best with a personal example that I often use in speeches to Jewish audiences.

I was raised both as an Orthodox Jew and a liberal Democrat. In my early 20s, not wanting to practice religious laws solely out of habit or fear, I experimented with religious non-observance.

I remember well the one time this yeshiva graduate ate ham. It was emotionally difficult.

I also well remember the first time this lifelong Democrat voted Republican. And it, too, was difficult. In fact, it was actually more emotionally difficult to vote Republican than to eat the ham.

Now, how could that be? How could it possibly have been more emotionally trying for a lifelong Democrat to vote Republican than for a lifelong observant Jew to eat ham? Isn’t religion a far deeper conviction than politics?

The question implies the answer.

Liberalism and leftism are religions. While I felt I would be sinning against God when I tasted ham, I was certain I was sinning against both God and man were I to vote Republican.

Obama’s speech: throwing Israel under the bus

The New Neo Posted on by

Obama’s Middle East speech (full text here) pays lip service to Assad of Syria needing to reform or quit, support for more rights for the Iranian people, and giving Egypt a financial break.

I can’t quite imagine either Assad or Ahmadinejad shaking in their shoes because Obama says so. Even the wave of pressure for democracy in the region doesn’t seem to have threatened them overmuch so far.

As for Israel and Palestine:

President Obama said the borders of Israel and a Palestinian state should be based on pre-1967 borders, referring to those that existed before the Six-Day War – which includes the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem.

Correspondents say the apparent change of emphasis is set to anger Israel, which has previously said that endorsing the 1967 borders would prejudge peace negotiations.

This represents a break from previous administrations, and is sure to cause shockwaves throughout the region.

Even before this speech, Jewish donors to the Obama campaign were feeling a bit uneasy. It’s hard to imagine that this will reassure them—although for many, their liberalism will trump any sense of obligation to Israel’s continued existence.

I’m guessing that Obama feels quite secure in his support from wealthy Jews, no matter what he does or says regarding Israel and Palestine. But is he correct in that perception? Even a year ago, he had lost a surprising amount of support among Jewish voters.

Of course, Jewish voters are a tiny percentage of the voting public, and losing a few—even quite a few—probably doesn’t matter much. They are heavily concentrated in strongly liberal enclaves such as New York and Los Angeles, where the defection of some will hardly make a difference, although it could matter in Florida. But wealthy Jewish donors may be a different matter, and losing enough of them could smart.

[ADDENDUM: Romney channels neo-neocon.]

College graduates find a tough job market

The New Neo Posted on by

The news that college graduates have been having trouble finding jobs, especially positions in their fields, should come as no surprise whatsoever. Different generations have different patterns of luck, and those who come of age in a time of economic recession or depression are going to have trouble getting started in life.

They may never catch up.

I was raised by parents who were young adults during the Depression, the big one that was distinguished by having a capital “D” as its initial letter. My mother used to tell me tales of Depression woe quite regularly.

She had been engaged in college to a student at Columbia Law School, but he could not find work on graduation, so they never married. He ended up becoming a career Army officer, so he didn’t do half badly, but that was much later.

In the community where we lived, my mother knew the history of many of her friends with whom she’d gone to grade school and high school. She used to point out their sad career trajectories, or lack thereof, “He wanted to be a gym teacher,” (which had seemed a modest enough aspiration to me at the time), “but he had to quit school to help support his parents and never finished high school.” Now he pushed racks of clothing around the garment district.

This one, that one; all had tales. Some had done well, of course, but many had not. They were all still friends, by the way, despite their different circumstances in life. When I heard these stories, I felt a strong sense of the precariousness of plans and the random nature of fate. I also developed a deep respect for the power of economic cycles and their ability to affect a person’s life forever.

I had a relatively small taste of the same thing when my husband earned a doctorate during the Carter years and tried to get a job on his emergence from the grind. It was nearly impossible; hiring had dried up in his field. He went on interview after interview where hundreds of people were applying for a single job. Finally he found one, although it involved his doing something different from what he’d hoped, and in a part of the country far from where we’d wanted to set up stakes. But we were both grateful that he’d gotten it at all.

One of the differences between then and now is that fewer people incurred huge debts in going either to college and graduate school. Unlike today, tuition was more reasonable in comparison to the standard of living. Recent graduates now not only have to deal with unemployment, but their school debts tend to be massive.

What’s more—call them spoiled, call them privileged, call them anything you want—their expectations of life are higher, and therefore the disappointment greater when they fail to meet them. The go-go good years that they observed while growing up lasted longer, and the flying was higher. Today’s graduates know almost nothing else—nor did they have those Depression-era parents to warn them that it could all disappear at any moment.

Accidentally becoming a part of history

The New Neo Posted on by

I was thinking about conspiracy theories last night. In the garden of the forking paths that is internet research, that led me to read up on the Kennedy assassination.

It’s not as though I was previously unfamiliar with the facts. I was alive back then and remember it well, plus I’ve read many articles and books on the subject since. But I’m not one of those people who’s memorized all the details, and so when I revisit them I often find there are interesting surprises, things I had forgotten or never really paid attention to in the first place.

One is them is the story of Johnny Calvin Brewer, a 22-year-old shoe store manager who was instrumental in the capture of Lee Harvey Oswald.

Brewer had heard the news of the Kennedy shooting as well as that of Officer Tippit, the latter occurring in the neighborhood where Brewer worked. Shortly thereafter, Brewer noticed a man in the foyer of the shoe store. He appeared to have ducked in there to avoid some police cars passing by, which Brewer thought was suspicious behavior.

The alert Brewer followed the man to a nearby movie theater, where his quarry entered without paying and Brewer asked the management to call the police. Meanwhile Brewer and another man guarded the exits to make sure Oswald didn’t leave, and then pointed him out to the police, who apprehended him after a struggle (see Brewer’s Warren Commission testimony).

Brewer has faded into such obscurity that I had forgotten he existed. But he had his moment in history, partly because of an accident of proximity and partly because he was smart enough and assertive enough to have a good hunch and follow through on it. But for his actions, would Oswald ever have been caught? We’ll never know; but just imagine the extent of the conspiracy theories that would have been hatched if he hadn’t!

Another person who was accidentally made famous by the Kennedy assassination was Abraham Zapruder. All he did was watch the motorcade—and take his movie camera along to film it:

Not originally intending to bring his camera to the motorcade, at the insistence of his assistant he retrieved it from home before going to Dealey Plaza.

Zapruder’s was not the only film record of the assassination, but it was by far the best, partly because of his vantage point and timing, partly because he stood on a slightly elevated concrete pedestal to get a better view—and partly because, as he said in an early interview, despite the carnage and his own upset, “I kept on shooting.”

Zapruder sold the rights to the film to Life magazine for what was then the fairly princely sum of $150,000, but he retained some say in the matter of how it would be shown to the public of the time:

The night after the assassination, Zapruder is said to have had a nightmare in which he saw a booth in Times Square advertising “See the President’s head explode!” He determined that, while he was willing to make money from the film, he did not want the public to see the full horror of what he had seen. Therefore, a condition of the sale to Life was that frame 313, showing the fatal shot, would be withheld.

Zapruder also distinguished himself by giving $25,000 of his fee to Tippit’s widow. His wishes about the film were respected until after his 1970 death, when in 1975 ABC (and none other than Geraldo Rivera) showed the film—with frame 313 included—to a shocked American public for the first time.

Now, of course, it’s on YouTube. Our delicate sensibilities have become a lot less delicate over time. What’s more, when history happens now, there are a million cell phone cameras to record it from every possible angle.

But extraordinary events still make heroes out of seemingly ordinary people. Flight 93 is an excellent example. No doubt those heroes, and their families, would have given almost anything to have not been selected for that task. But their fate was otherwise.

Risky behavior among the rich and famous

The New Neo Posted on by

Richard Fernandez speculates on why DSK may have risked it all to rape a hotel maid. His conclusion is that DSK didn’t perceive the behavior as having much risk at all:

For most of people in the world without influence or power, the probability of suffering punishment for rape is such that few would risk their liberty and fortune for the dubious and disgusting thrill of chasing a hotel cleaner around a room. That discount rate, even absent any morality, makes cowards of us all. But if a particular person believed that his individual risk of being punished was virtually zero then it would make perfect economic sense for that person to gratify his monstrous appetites. If in fact such a person did not believe he was risking anything by chasing the cleaner, nothing would deter him from doing it, excepting of course, his own character.

If this is true—and it makes a great deal of sense to me—why did DSK think there was so little risk for him? Apparently he had gotten away with risky sexual behavior many times in the past, although perhaps not this exact sort of behavior. After a while he probably thought himself immune to any consequences.

The same sort of thing explains Arnold Schwarzenegger’s sexual acting-out, and Bill Clinton’s, plus John Edwards’s and…well, you get the idea. There’s a lot of this going around among the famous, power-driven, and egotistical. It also makes perfect sense that the behavior would escalate over time. As the man feels safer and safer, and the need for sensation grows with age and repetition and perhaps boredom, he will cry for madder music and stronger wine.

Gingrich: character revealing itself

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve never liked Newt Gingrich. At all.

It’s not that I couldn’t see he’s a pretty bright guy. He is, about some things.

And it’s not just that my initial exposure to him was back when I was a liberal Democrat and predisposed to disagree with him. Nor was it his singularly distasteful name, a cross between a small amphibian and a Dr. Seuss villain.

gingrinch.jpg

No, my dislike was about something more basic and more lasting than ideology: character. And I’m not talking about Gingrich’s habit of cheating on his wives, although that hardly endeared him to me (and by the way, the story about him asking wife number one for a divorce when she was recovering from cancer surgery is apparently untrue).

The personality trait that has especially repulsed me about Gingrich is a self-serving ruthlessness that he exudes, a smallness and a lack of sincerity coupled with extreme personal arrogance.

You might say the same about our current president, minus the marital infidelities. In Obama’s case it is coupled with a certain superficial ease and charm that Gingrich lacks. But just as the more we see of Obama the more he demonstrates his flaws, the more we see of Gingrich (and by now we’ve seen way too much of him) the more he demonstrates his.

The most recent example, of course, is Gingrich’s ill-considered attack on Rep. Ryan’s budget proposal regarding Medicare. Gingrich is probably stunned by the strength of the backlash from almost all Republican quarters, but that only demonstrates his tone-deafness. Right now the Republican Party does not need a has-been politician with high negatives gratuitously trashing an intelligent and courageous proposal from a likable up-and-coming young congressman who is already one of the few Republican hopes on the horizon. It is seen as a betrayal, and rightly so.

The WSJ has been merciless to Gingrich:

Yet now [Gingrich] is trashing Mr. Ryan for thinking far more deeply about health care, and in a far more principled fashion, than Mr. Gingrich ever has. The episode reveals the Georgian’s weakness as a candidate, and especially as a potential President””to wit, his odd combination of partisan, divisive rhetoric and poll-driven policy timidity.

Gingrich was already a weak candidate before his ill-fated statement. Now he’s almost certainly a finished one: “Newt of the Four Days,” which is the length of time before his candidacy self-imploded.

The Schwarzenegger affair: Arnold and Maria just grew apart…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and then there’s the little matter of the 10-year-old out-of-wedlock child, fathered by Schwarzenegger during his affair with a long-time household employee.

There’s a feeling of deja vu here, although the details are always slightly different: powerful guy can’t keep it in his pants, no matter how lovely the wife or how fervent the vows, or how loyally she protects him. Although it’s impossible to know what’s truth and what’s a coverup, it appears in this case that Schwarzenegger’s wife Maria Shriver only recently found out about the affair, although there had been tensions between them for years. But she had stood by her husband and defended his honor and integrity during his campaign, when charges of previous gropings had surfaced.

Cheating is hardly confined to the rich and famous, although it seems to have found an especially cozy home among political men. Nor should this be any sort of surprise. Not only is it an old story, but the character traits of drive and arrogance that so often go with political ambitions, plus the prevalence of increased opportunity afforded by the political life, make it almost an inevitability. As Kissinger famously said, “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac,” and Schwarzenegger, after all, possessed the multiple powers of the celebrity, the politician, the movie star, and the physical strongman.

This does not excuse his behavior, of course. For wife Maria Shriver, if the affair was indeed a recent revelation, the shame of her having defended him while ignorant of the truth would add to the sharpness of her feeling of betrayal. It’s often not the crime so much as the coverup, a fact Schwarzenegger ought to have known but probably ignored.

More on David Mamet, political changer

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “Jimmy J.”]

I’ve written about playwright David Mamet’s left-to-right political conversion before, but Andrew Ferguson’s new piece in the Weekly Standard updates us on some of the details, and just how far he’s come.

As conversion stories go it’s a typical tale, although Mamet is hardly a typical person. But he has many characteristics of the classic changer:

—He’d always been a fiercely independent thinker and skeptical of “received wisdom,” although previously this characteristic had not been expressed in the political realm

—He’d previously been almost entirely unacquainted with conservatives, and in fact rather politically disinterested:

It was the first time he thought about partisan politics for any sustained period.

“This was after the 2004 election,” he told me [Ferguson] in an interview last month. “I’d never met a conservative. I didn’t know what a conservative was. I didn’t know much of anything.

—When he began to question his previous beliefs, he was open to reading conservative writers and gave them a fair hearing.

—In retrospect, it seems he was conservative all along and was unaware of that fact:

“I think he has the same values today that he did before,” [Shelby] Steele said. “He’s said to me he thinks he might have always been conservative without knowing it. All that happened was, he finally found a politics that suited his values.

—Once his conversion was underway, it took on a life of its own, and it hasn’t been easy. Most changers are as shocked and reluctant as Mamet was, but they are unable to deny the evidence once it is before them, and must follow where it leads, including to self-recrimination and social ostracism:

“Forcing yourself into a new way of thinking about things is a wrenching experience. But first you have to look back and atone. You think, ”˜Oh my god, what have I done? What was I thinking?’ You realize you’ve been a co-dependent with the herd. And then, when you decide to say what you’ve discovered, out loud, you take the risk that everyone you know will look on you as a fool.”

Ferguson says that Mamet is reluctant to talk about what his conversion has cost him psychologically, or what it might cost him professionally. My guess is that he has lost old friends but gained many new ones; for example, he’s been fortunate, because of his celebrity and contacts, to have met both Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele and become friends with both of them. It also sounds as though his marriage hasn’t suffered because of his conversion, as relationships sometimes do.

Mamet says he doesn’t read blogs. It’s a pity, because I think he’d enjoy mine.

Well, at least Strauss-Kahn isn’t being accused of hypocrisy…

The New Neo Posted on by

…for his alleged sexual predation, because he’s not a conservative. He’s a socialist.

He’s also French, and the French have long been famous for ignoring (or perhaps even admiring?) the sexual peccadilloes of their randy politicians.

But the current allegations seem more serious. This isn’t about a high-class mistress—even a “well-documented affair with…a Hungarian economist and a junior colleague at the IMF,” which resulted in a 2008 apology by Strauss-Kahn, but no finding that he’d abused his power (although the woman in question indicated that he had). Nor is it about a family friend’s 20-something daughter who alleged in 2007 that he’d attacked her in 2002, although she’d never pressed charges because, “I didn’t want to be known to the end of my days as the girl who had a problem with the politician.”

If true, the type of attack that is now alleged is pretty unambiguously criminal, and involves a far more declasse victim: hotel maid. Perhaps Strauss-Kahn was showing he’s a man of the people? Whatever the truth or falsehood of the claim (which was made immediately after the offense), it does seem as though this guy has been spinning out of control for quite some time, and has only been emboldened (as perps often are) by the fact that he’s been getting away with it.

The present case is fraught with drama, not the least of which is its international nature. Strauss-Kahn almost made a successful getaway; he was pulled off an Air France flight at the last minute and taken into custody. As for the accuser, the only tidbit of news I’ve been able to glean about her is this, “The police have provided few details about the woman at the center of the case beyond saying she was 32 and an African immigrant.”

[NOTE: Reports are that, had this incident not occurred, Strauss-Kahn might have been elected France’s next president. Interesting; I had no idea the socialists were so in the ascendance in France.]