Frank’s Case Book

It is now the appropriate time to congratulate President-Elect Barack Obama. Although we find here his policies to be in severe error and in many ways a threat to liberty, his election brings an important salutatory result. With the election of an African-American president, we have erased one more vestige of a sometimes ugly past that included slavery, Jim Crow laws, and all manner of discrimination against black Americans. The legal discriminatory restrictions passed decades ago, but this election provides evidence that Americans now generally see beyond color. Given the historic nature of this election, race has played a thankfully small role.

Conservatives now should regroup and re-articulate our vision of freedom and stand up to those who would trade freedom for security. We should, at all costs, avoid an Obama version of “Bush Derangement Syndrome” that polluted politics for the last eight years.

It has been a difficult and stressful week nationally. Congress struggled with whether to pass a $700  billion “rescue bill” to alleviate instability in the financial markets. The decision was not an easy one. Would it be better to allow those companies that made unwise economic decisions to suffer the economic consequences or would the fallout from such failures cause an unnecessarily deep economic collapse? Are our current economic problems the consequence of unfettered free enterprise or the fault of government sponsored enterprisee like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae encouraging loans to individuals and families without sufficient resources to repay them.

This week, 70 million of us also experienced the vice-presidential debate contest between Senator Joe Biden and Governor Sarah Palin. With the competitive spirit unleashed from the debate, there was the simple temptation to consider here the observation that the lower income Palin family appears to be far more generous than the Biden family with their charitable donations. Although there are many liberals that are very generous, the reliance on government, practiced and advocated by Liberals, attenuates personal responsibility for charitable giving making Liberals less likely to embrace private donations. See Who Really Cares by Author Brooks for documentation.

Rather now, in the midst of charged and sometimes mean-spirited partisan rancor, it is heartening to witness small, but revealing acts of humanity.

At the end of the vice-presidential debate, the Sarah Palin and Joe Biden families met on stage and exchanged pleasantries and handshakes. There was a brief moment shown in the picture (from Reuters on the left) with Palin and Biden engaging in friendly post-debate conversation. Between them, stood Piper, Palin’s 7-year old daughter. Like any neighbor might, Biden had his hands gently and protectively resting on Piper’s shoulders. Quite obviously, Piper has been brought up well enough to know how to conduct herself around adults. The whole picture had the air of a friendly chat after a PTA meeting where the principals were debating whether to spend PTA money on a swing set.

The issues debated, of course, were of far more import. Nonetheless, the scene is a salutary reminder that Palin and Biden are good and decent people and that both deserve the respect of honest policy criticism and not the personal attacks that have drowned out so much of the legitimate political conversation.

The life of an academic can be very agreeable. The working conditions are pleasant. One is surrounded by eager young minds. There is usually no hard labor involved. Pay is sufficient for a middle class lifestyle, but few academics ever earn enough money to firmly ensconce themselves in the upper middle class. The exceptions come for those who manage to bring in government sponsored research grants or who pen bestsellers.

The material success of some business people and others chafes against the sense of justice of some academics. In school, successful academics widely surpassed most of their contemporaries. By God, they are smarter and more clever than these other people. How can can they be so materially successful? Some deal with this perceived injustice by retreating to a smug arrogance that those successful in a non-academic fields are simple-minded Philistines. There is an acknowledgment that professionals like doctor, lawyers, and dentists achieve affluence, but that is OK because they are degreed professionals. Even academics have to concede the intellectual abilities associated with these professions.

Accents can be a key discriminator. If one does carry an accent from an Eastern school or at best a mid-western standard English pronunciation, there is the suspicion that  that person is from the hinterlands, and not quite up to the intellectual rigors of national leadership. While there are many who might feel comfortable with President George Bush’s Texas drawl, there are others from who this provide evidences of a less than stellar mind.

This snobbishness explains the response by academics on the Left (see Clark Clifford) who laughed a Ronald Reagan as an “amiable dunce.” It even explains the reaction by the Left to Justice Clarence Thomas. It is amazing to read criticisms of the mental capacities of Justice Thomas from some who have never read a opinion by Thomas or even any Supreme Court opinion. Is always comforting to assume a position of intellectual superiority over political adversaries.

What is often missed is that the skills and temperament to be a successful political or business leader to not have large areas of overlap with those skills that make a successful academic, attorney or similar professions. Politicians and wealthy business leaders require an above average intelligence and will benefit from wide experience, but at least as important is an ability inspire confidence and loyalty among subordinates. Successful politicians and business people benefit a preternatural ability to connect emotionally with people and to assess others.

What used to frustrate Liberal academics and pseudo-intellectuals about William F. Buckley and continues to annoy them about George F. Will, is that their conspicuous intellectual ability and academic credentials makes in difficult to lampoon with caricatures of Conservative buffoons.  Nonetheless, when confronted with a new conservative, the Left’s (particularly the academic Left’s) instinctive reaction is to seek out speech or factual errors as certain evidence of lack of intellectual capacity.

This has been the pattern so far as Governor Sarah Paliln has emerged on the national scene after having been selected as a Vice-Presidential running mate for Senator John McCain. First, there was the attempt make fun of her small-town background. However, this did not go over well with many Americans who either live in or used to live in small towns. This  tactic was at least less despicable than making Palin’s unwed pregnant daughter the butt of jokes and the victim of vicious rumors of incest.

Palin’s accent was different. But before that could become an object of ridicule, she delivered a blow-out speech at the Republican National Convention with charisma and an innate flair for comedic timing. This was a woman that could more than hold her own in a public venue.

The notion of mentally inferiority dies hard and surely there would be an opportunity to slip her up. In the interview with Charlie Gibson, Gibson asked her opinion on the “Bush doctrine.” She responded, “In what respect, Charlie?” Gibson had a difficulat time being specific.

The Left touted her unpreparedness. Doesn’t she know what the Bush Doctrine is? Well as it turns out there was not single document or speech that points to a single Bush Doctrine. Rather it is composed of a set not necessarily connected components, including the willingness to act unilaterally if necessary, going after countries that harbor terrorists, and acting preemptively. Palin’s response was not only adequate, but displayed depth of understanding that escaped Gibson during the interview.

No one is perfectly knowledgeable or perfectly glib. Palin will make mistakes. However, consider the following errors:

• Senator Barack Obama once referred to 57 US states. “Over the last 15 months, we’ve traveled to every corner of the United States. I’ve now been in 57 states? I think one left to go.”
• Obama clamed that the the Selma March in 1965  helped to bring his parents together. Obama was born in 1961.
• As an example of the diversion of resources from Afghanistan to Iraq, Obama cited the lack of translators, “We only have a certain number of them, and if they are all in Iraq, then it’s harder for us to use them in Afghanistan.” However, in Iraq the primary languages are Arabic and Kurdish, while according to the CIA World Factbook, Afghans speak, “Afghan Persian or Dari (official) 50%, Pashto (official) 35%, Turkic languages (primarily Uzbek and Turkmen) 11%.”
• Obama claimed that “I had a uncle who was one of the, who was part of the first American troops to go into Auschwitz and liberate the concentration camps.” His uncle most certainly played an noble role in fighting in World War II, but Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviets.
• In an interview  with  George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s This Week, Obama referred to “my Muslim faith.” Obama is a Christian.
• Senator Joe Biden, Obama’s irrepressible  running mate, “When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.”’ Biden seems to have forgotten that the famous stock market crash of 1929 occurred under President Herbert Hoover’s administration and at the time television was just experimental. The Germans introduced the “first non-experimental public” television broadcast in 1935. Such broadcasts to only a few people began int he US in 1939.

These misstatements are arguably all the result of exhaustion, simple misspeaking, historical sloppiness, or the common political disease of hyperbole. They do not constitute evidence of stupidity or incoherence. However, if Sarah Palin had made analogous statements, they would have received more play in the national media and provided fodder for Left-wind blogs and late-night comedians.

When you hear people make fun of Sarah Palin’s lack intelligence point out that they are nurturing a thesis in search of a evidence, while ignoring evidence that does not support their preconceived notions. People speak with assumed authority on Palin’s lack intelligence largely saying more about their own world view than they are about someone they hardly know.

The will come a time when it is impossible to understand how Senator Barack Obama’s reference to the old metaphor of putting lipstick on a pig, as a colorful way to indicate a vain attempt to make something fundamentally unattractive appear beautiful through the expedient of a cosmetic change, caused such an uproar. Perhaps was near contemporaneous exploration of the issue will be of some small future value for all those political science theses that will be written on the subject.

Here are Obama’s words:

“John McCain says he’s about change, too.And so I guess his whole angle is, ‘Watch out, George Bush! Except for economic policy, health care policy, tax policy, education policy, foreign policy, and Karl Rove-style politics, we’re really going to shake things up in Washington. That’s not change. That’s just calling something the same thing something different. But you know, you can put lipstick on a pig. It’s still a pig. You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change, it’s still going to stink after eight years. We’ve had enough of the same old thing.

Clearly, within the immediate context of the quotation, the “lipstick on a pig” referred to the Bush policies that could not be made to look better. If that same metaphor had been used earlier in the the campaign, it would be impossible to read any different meaning into it. Unfortunately, it was not a metaphor Obama had recently used, but one that unleashed after the nomination of Governor Sarah Palin for vice-president.

Days before, Palin had cited the now famous joke: “What is the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull… Lipstick.” The joke became a signature comment and the word “lipstick” was specifically associated with Palin and her feminity. It is in this total context not only the context of his words that day that Obama had made his remarks. Moreover, the phrase “old fish” could be applied to Senator John McCain.

Taken together, the remarks could be viewed as a clever swipe against both halves of the national ticket. Indeed,the smirking laughs that followed Obama’s comments indicate that the the audience got the joke.

Until they changed their coverage to hide this crowd reaction, ABC news reported:

“The crowd rose and applauded, some of them no doubt thinking he may have been alluding to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s ad lib during her vice presidential nomination acceptance speech last week..”

while AP recorded the same impression:

“”You can put lipstick on a pig,” he [Obama] said to an outbreak of laughter, shouts and raucous applause from his audience, clearly drawing a connection to Palin’s joke even if it’s not what Obama meant….”

It is impossible to peer into Obama’s mind and know his intention. There remain a couple of possibilities. The more negative interpretation is that he was making a vaguely misogynistic remark against Palin. The less damning one is that he was unaware of how the remark would be interpreted. This is not quite the image of the clever constitutional law lawyer adept a parsing sentence and interpreting words in the context of the times.

It is interesting to examine a time line of the public life of Senator Barack Obama, the top of the Democratic presidential ticket, and Governor Sarah Palin, number two on the Republican ticket.

From 1992 to 1996, Sarah Palin served two terms on the city council of the small town of Wasilla, AK. During the same time, Obama was a lawyer and community organizer in Chicago. The year 1996 was important for both. Palin ran for and was elected mayor of Wasilla, while Obama was elected to the Illinois State Senate.

Palin served as mayor for her two-term limit to 2002 and then ran unsuccessfully for Lieutenant Governor of Alaska. Instead, she ended up serving on the state Ethics Commission and the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.  In 2004, Obama was elected to the US Senate where he has served since. In 2006, Palin was elected Governor of Alaska, overcoming the old-boy Republican establishment in Alaska.

Essentially, we have a young national legislator versus an young state governor. While it is legitimate to argue that a US Senator gains experience considering national issues, a state governor gains executive experience managing a large governmental enterprise. Both are important for a President or Vice-President.

If Obama and Palin were not running for national office now, it would be hard to make a case about whom had greater experience necessary to be the national chief executive. However, over the last year Obama has been running for President. This has not so much increased his legislative experience, but it has given the nation an opportunity to listen to him and assess his seriousness on issues. Is not so much that he has acquired experience, but that the country has grown accustomed to him and in some modest way taken his measure.

While Obama has been campaigning for President, Palin has been running the state government of Alaska. Only Alaskans really have had time and exposure to appreciate her merits and recognize her flaws. By the time the election occurs this fall, we will have had ample opportunity to take the measure of Palin. Is not so much that she will gain experience, but we will grow in our experience of her. In any objective office-holding sense, Obama does not have more experience then Palin and arguable less, rather we have more experience of him. This lack is remedial.

In March of 2003, Barack Obama was state senator in Illinois dealing with the Illinois Born Alive Infact Protection Act (BAIPA). The key goal of the act was to make it an affirmative obligation to render conventional medical treatment to all children born, even if the birth was a consequence of an induced abortion. The act brushed against the ragged, politically dangerous edges of the pro-choice and pro-life movements.

One aim of pro-life advocates was to ensure that children born alive and completely separate from their mothers are not treated as medical waste, but accorded appropriate medical attention. Pro-lifers may want to prevent abortions, but there is a much broader constituency who would want to protect children already born. Testimony before Congress has reported cases where live children, the product of unsuccessful abortions, were unceremoniously disposed of rather than treated. The concern was clearly not just a theoretical one.

Pro-choice advocates were concerned that about the legal assertion of rights for babies that were theoretically pre-viable; though one might  expect viability to change as a function of medical technology. Specifically, the  Illinois BAIPA declared, “A live child born as a result of an abortion shall be fully recognized as a human person and accorded immediate protection under the law.” The pro-choice community is perhaps rightly concerned that someone sometime in the future might ask the embarrassing question: How is a being a fully recognized human only moments after being excess tissue?

The legislative dilemma is how to reconcile the humanity of treating with medical respect babies born alive versus the concerns of the pro-choice community to avoid the legislative precedent of declaring babies born alive as persons. Obama and his Democratic colleagues implemented a compromise by adding a clause to the  law that would effectively prevent the law’s use a precedent against abortion. Specifically they added:

“Nothing in this Section shall be construed to affirm, deny, expand, or contract any legal status or legal right applicable to any member of the species homo sapiens at any point prior to being born alive as defined in this Section.”

Curiously, the record shows that Obama voted only for the amendment, but still voted against the bill. The problem is that Obama’s district was still sufficiently to the Left, that deviation from pro-choice purity, even at the cost of the maltreatment of born-live infants, would have had political costs. Either Obama believed that such infants do not deserve such protection or that the political costs of approving the bill were too high. The whole episode was hardly  a “profile in courage.”

If this story became widely acknowledged, it would make Obama appear far out of the national mainstream on the issue of abortion. When asked about the vote in 2004, Obama claimed, according to the Chicago Tribune, that  he voted against the state legislation but would have supported a similar federal bill because “the state measure lacked the federal language clarifying that the act would not be used to undermine Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court opinion that legalized abortion.” However, contrary to Obama’s assertion, the two bills are nearly identical. Obama knew they were nearly identical because he was chairman of the committee that amended the bill so that it would resemble its federal counterpart.

Rather that conceding the issue, Obama accused his pro-life critics of “lying” about his record. Finally, Obama’s campaign’s has conceded that the federal and state bills were near identical. The only way to reconcile his vote in Illinois against the BAIPA and his later claim that would have voted for the nearly identical federal act, is that in both cases he was acting in immediate political self-interest.

There is certainly room to argue about Obama’s first vote in Illinois, though it does depict him as part of the extreme pro-choice wing of the spectrum. However, there is no excuse to misrepresent his vote and worst to call others liars for disputing what turns out to be the facts of this case.

It is not surprising that this story has not been discussed much in the pro-Obama press, but the story is slowly emerging. One character test for Obama supporters is how do they deal with this report. The reactions can involve either be honesty, dishonesty, or deliberate self-deception

One honest reaction is to concede Obama’s serious mistake and consequent dishonesty, but still maintain their support given his overall record and ideology. However, this would tend to undermine the serious messiah complex of some Obama supporters.

The dishonest way is to continue to obfuscate the issue and to attack the veracity of opponents. This will undoubtedly be the reaction of political partisans.

Perhaps the most common way for Obama supporters to deal with the issue is denial. Rather than examine carefully the details of this serious vote and related dishonesty, they will just to avert their gaze. They will not take the time an effort to determine out the truth. It easier to believe that political enemies are after your candidate than to face an unpleasant truth.

A pro-life advocate, Jill Stanek, performed the difficult task of digging up many of the original documents some of which are linked to in this post.

It is often interesting to watch old movies and television programs. Although there are certainly classic movies and programing with a timeless quality, it is often illuminating to see the world through the unique cultural vision of the period . Perhaps the most conspicuous and consistent difference is the past glamorization of smoking before the 1960s, whereas by contemporary standards smoking is considered déclassé. Other times we are reminded of more heroic perspectives.

This week the TV Land network aired an episode of Lou Grant with an important message for our times.  If you remember back to the 1970s, the character Lou Grant, played by actor Edward Asner, began with comedy, the Mary Tyler Moore show, set in a Minnesota newsroom. Lou Grant was a spinoff drama, where character Lou Grant was now a news editor of the fictitious Los Angeles Tribune.

In the particular episode, Nazi, reporter Billie Newman (Linda Kelsey) is pursuing a story about an American Nazi  who turns out have been born Jewish. The salient point here is that the reporter was fearful for her life, but pursued the story nonetheless. The show was not shy about moralizing, and the message here was clear: Fidelity to the truth and the unfettered right of free expression often requires courage. In this case, the reporter was not threatened by government censorship, but self-censorship induced by fear of private person or group.

Three decades later, that message of courage seems to have been forgotten. Sherry Jones is  a journalist who has taken a considerable interest in Islamic culture and pursued its study. That study and several years of writing led to a fictionalized historical novel about Mohammad and his favorite wife Aisha. Random House publishing company advanced Jones $100,000 for two books, of which The Jewel of Medina was the first.

Now Random House has lost it publishing nerve. As far as we know, there have been no specific threats against Random House or the author. Rather, the book was sent to Denise Spellberg, a scholar in Islamic studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Spellberg warned that some Muslims might find the book offensive. After the experience of the Danish anti-Mohammad cartoons that caused riots and the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini for the death of Salmon Rushdie who wrote the Satanic Versus, Random  House is apprehensive.

With this recent history, the concern about a violent reaction to a book that is perceived, rightly or wrongly, as insulting to Islam, is not irrational and precautions are prudent. However, if Random House and the author are convinced of the literary quality of The Jewel of Medina, they would demonstrate considerable moral fortitude in proceeding with the publication. If not, they will help establish precedent that one can successfully intimidate the publishing community.