Trudeau and Obama

I was chatting with my Dad last night, and the subject of American politics came up. We both seem to agree that Barack Obama has been a huge disappointment as President. Although we come to that conclusion from different perspectives, the central point for me (and my Dad as well, I think) is that Obama is a weak and ineffectual leader, not because he isn't smart (clearly, he is), or because he doesn't have ideas (clearly, he does), but because he lacks the will and the courage to take a stand, and risk his political future. In short, he would rather "go along to get along" in the hopes of re-election than do what's right and run the risk of defeat. In doing so, I think that he has lost people's respect, and if he faces a remotely competent and capable Republican next year, I think there's a good chance that he will lose the 2012 election.

All of this led Dad and I to a discussion of leadership, and what makes a good leader. Some familiar names popped up (Churchill, Roosevelt), and then we got around to Pierre Trudeau, who was Prime Minister of Canada from 1968 until 1979, and again from 1980 until 1984. Trudeau was the kind of intellectual that Obama can only dream of being, but he was also a thug. He preferred to reason his way to a solution, but if people didn't agree with him, he would do everything within his power to have his way. Compromise was not part of his nature, although he was forced to do it from time to time. As a result, he was hated by many Canadians (and loved by many as well), but his political enemies (and he had legions) always respected him, as did the Canadian people.

With Trudeau, what you saw was almost always exactly what you got. He made many mistakes, including in my opinion the implementation of the War Measures Act in 1970. He had style and courage, both personal and political, and his considerable intellect was wrapped in brass-knuckles. He was never afraid to engage the people who disagreed with him, including the media.

Above all else, Trudeau always seemed comfortable in his own skin. He knew who he was, and didn't worry about what others thought of him in the personal sense. It came across as arrogance to many, and self-confidence to others. Both are hallmarks of a true Philosopher King, and Trudeau was as close as we've come in many years to seeing someone who fits that description, for good and ill. As he said in the interview below, "living should be fun."

At best, Obama might aspire to be a pale shadow of the leader and the person that Trudeau was, but even that would be better than what we have now with the President - a suit and a smile, a few catch-phrases from a teleprompter, and a man who seems to lack the intellectual integrity and moral courage to take a stand, and stick with it, even if it means being defeated. 

Paul Kimball

"Thought" du jour - 13 August 2011

"Corporations are people." - Mitt Romney

Mitt Romney has been accused of being a serial flip-flopper, a man with no core idealogical principles. He instituted a form of public health care as Governor of Massachusetts, and now mercilessly attacks what he calls "Obamacare", which is essentially the same idea. He was once pro-abortion; he now claims to be vehemently anti-abortion. And on, and on...

Romney does have a core, guiding principle, however, and it's summed up in his most recent gaffe, which he made in response to some pointed questioning by a voter in Iowa this past week. No matter how much he tries to spin it now, his remark - "corporations are people" - underlines what Mitt Romney truly believes in: big business. He does his best to hide it, or to explain it away, because it's out of tune with what the prevailing mood within the grassroots of the Republican Party (and the prevailing mood of the United States in general at the moment), but given who he is, and what he's done, it's clear that this fealty to corporate America is the one defining principle that guides everything that Mitt Romney does. This makes him the perfect, traditional pro-business Republican, in a year when being a perfect, traditional pro-business Republican is like having a scarlett "A" sewn on your shirt.

The thing is, Romney is right, at least in the purely in the legal sense, because the law does define corporations as people, which is what I'm sure he was thinking of in that moment when he gave his answer to the voter in Iowa.

A real American.

But no matter what the law says, corporations are not people. Corporations don't have to struggle to put food on the table for their families, corporations don't face the prospect of losing their homes, and corporations don't wind up on the streets of America's cities, a permanent underclass of the disenfranchised and hopeless.

America's economic troubles aren't the result of run-away government spending, or socialism, or any of the other straw-men that Republicans (and more than a few Democrats) have put forward as the culprit. They also aren't a minor speed-bump on the march of never-ending progress and wealth. They are systemic, the result of a corporatist political culture that has caved in to big business, and has pushed forward over thirty years of deregulation in the name of ever-increasing profits, at the expense of the middle and working classes. In other words, at the expense of the American people.

If modern corporate America were a person, the diagnosis would be a terminal illness.  Romney might tell voters that the disease can be cured, and that he's the man to do it, but it's a placebo. All that someone like him will do is prolong the suffering a bit longer.

It's time for the real people of America to pull the plug.

Paul Kimball

"Thought" du jour - 11 August 2011

“With the economy in trouble, communities in crisis and people adrift in a sea of moral relativism, we need God's help. That's why I'm calling on Americans to pray and fast like Jesus did and as God called the Israelites to do in the Book of Joel.” - Rick Perry

Rick Perry isn't officially in the race for the Republican nomination, but the odds are that he's going to run. Even if he doesn't, he remains representative of what used to be called the "evangelical wing" of the Republican Party, but which can more resembles the "Ayatollah wing", because they're so far too the religious right as to make the old "evangelical wing" look almost quaint by comparison.

I heartily recommend "Army of God" in the most recent edition of the Texas Observer about Perry, his views, and his ties to the far right "end times" movement within American Christianity, which has been growing over the past decade or so, and which has influence in all aspects of American public life, perhaps most worryingly in the military.

I don't know about you, but this incipient American Taliban is the last group I want to be conducting foreign policy (the Crusades) or domestic policy (the Inquisition). In a worst case scenario, one is even forced to wonder if it's safe to let them  have control of the nuclear launch codes, lest they decide that perhaps the End Times need a helping hand to get going. After all, we're told to worry that religious extremists might control nuclear weapons in places like Pakistan. Perhaps we should be just as worried about them controlling nuclear weapons in the United States of America.

Paul Kimball

"Thought" du jour - 10 August 2011

"The idea is that the state doesn't have rights to limit individuals' wants and passions. I disagree with that. I think we absolutely have rights because there are consequences to letting people live out whatever wants or passions they desire." - Rick Santorum

So much for the idea of the freedom of the individual. Never forget that the modern Republican Party equates "freedom" simply with the ability to earn more money (and they don't really mean a lot of money - just enough to afford an HD television and a couple of weeks of vacation at some consumerist Nirvana every year; in other words, just enough to keep you from really questioning the inequitable nature of the system that they want to maintain for their paymasters), as opposed to... well, everything else that makes us human - and yet somehow they've managed to convince a lot of Americans that it's the Democrats who want to control their lives.

There's a word for the kind of political philosophy that the Republican Party way of "thinking" represents, and the society to which it will inevitably lead. It's called Fascism.

Paul Kimball

"Thought" du jour - 9 August 2011

''If we took away the minimum wage - if conceivably it was gone - we could potentially virtually wipe out unemployment completely because we would be able to offer jobs at whatever level.'' - Michelle Bachmann

Thus do we begin a week of choice quotes from the leading contenders for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, just so that we can all remember who they really are, and what they really represent.

Paul Kimball