"A Mendacious Nation" - Nicholas Wapshott

Can Republicans tell the truth to themselves?
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By Nicholas Wapshott

Reuters / Opinion

January 29, 2013

To understand how far the republic founded by the famously truthful George Washington has become a mendacious nation, you need look only as far as the Weather Channel. According to a report, the meteorologists there deliberately and routinely tell untruths about the prospect of rain so that when it turns out to be sunny the network’s viewers feel unexpectedly happy. The practice, it seems, is widespread among weather forecasters. Joe Sobel, a meteorologist for Accuweather, tells his audience it will rain when he knows the likelihood is small because “when the forecast is for good weather and it’s bad, I certainly will get more grief than if the forecast is for bad weather and it’s good.”

When the accuracy of even weather forecasting, a once factual, rigorous, scientifically determined service relied upon by everyone from farmers to sailors, is compromised for fear of causing offense, America has reached a state of quotidian deceit even George Orwell did not reckon on. Lying over the weather is not the compulsive lying of Richard Nixon: “People have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook.” Or the visceral lying of Lance Armstrong, who even lied when he confessed to Oprah Winfrey, using the lying words, “I can’t lie to you …” and “I’m not going to lie to you or to the public …” Nor is it even the crooked lies of the price-fixing bankers who misled the markets and cost us all a pretty penny when they concocted the Libor lending rate to suit themselves.

Lying about the weather to please the masses is not so much lying as pandering on a prodigious scale. Bowing down before the voters has become so commonplace in Washington that when someone says something from the heart that is likely to provoke contemplation or discussion, they are dismissed as foolhardy. The president’s second inaugural address was full of soaring language and high ideals that reflected his ambitions for the nation. But Barack Obama was so liberal in his vision that the speech was derided by opponents as un-presidentially divisive and absurdly idealistic. The same charge was made against Ronald Reagan’s first inaugural address from the Democratic side. How dare the president say what he believes and where he is heading? Tell us what we like to hear, or at the least say something that will not offer hostages to fortune. Please pander more and stop talking like a leader.

Democratic leaders have no need to pander. Their next presidential candidates are already lining up, and it would be foolhardy indeed to dare tell Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden what to say or do. They are so obviously leaders with their own thoughts and agendas that the Democratic base is ready to follow them wherever they lead. That may be bad for party democracy, but it is good for winning elections. The Republican leadership, meanwhile, is so buffeted and bossed around by its Tea Party base that it conjures up images of high-rise ladder fire engines that have a driver at the front and another at the rear to steer round tight corners. The hilarious 2012 GOP primary season was a panderers’ parade, with every last candidate so eager to get on the right side of the far right they ended up, like poor Mitt Romney, as tangled as a fairground contortionist.

At a Republican National Committee election inquest in Williamsburg, Virginia, last week, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal risked his future as a 2016 presidential candidate by engaging in some straight talking. “We’ve got to stop being the Stupid Party. It’s time for a new Republican Party that talks like adults,” he said. ”We had a number of Republicans damage the brand this year with offensive and bizarre comments. I’m here to say we’ve had enough of that.” And: “A debate about which party can better manage the federal government is a very small and shortsighted debate. If our vision is not bigger than that, we do not deserve to win.” He declared that “the Republican Party does not need to change our principles ‑ but we might need to change just about everything else we do.” That’s not a message the Republican base wants to hear, but it sure sounds like leadership.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, too, has decided it is time to abandon pandering and offer an election-winning alternative. He thinks the endless talking points about Benghazi, abortion, gay marriage and taxes plainly did not resonate with voters and will soon advocate policies designed to broaden the GOP’s appeal beyond the base to embrace moderate Republicans who have been turned off by the hoary mantras of the “closed system” dogmatists content merely to talk to each other.

Speaking to an audience of the world’s political and business elite at Davos, well out of Tea Party earshot, Cantor described the 2012 election as “a wake-up call for a lot of folks” and spoke of introducing “sane immigration policies,” adopting German economic growth strategies and helping the unemployed find jobs. He will propose specific policies at the American Enterprise Institute on Feb. 5 that include private-school vouchers for poor parents, new workforce training programs and easy-to-obtain visas to lure high-tech immigrants – subjects [r3] that brand him as a dangerous appeaser among many of his party’s faithful.

These are early days in the Republican postmortem. Some appear ready to face the facts of defeat and avoid the head-on confrontation urged by their allies in what some conservatives describe as “the media-industrial complex” that earns its keep by urging on GOP extremists. Charles Krauthammer, a keeper of the complex, knows which side his bread is buttered and advises more of the same. “Ignore the trimmers,” he declared within hours of the November defeat. “There’s no need for radical change. … No whimpering. No whining. No reinvention when none is needed. Do conservatism but do it better. There’s a whole generation of leaders ready to do just that.” It is a sure recipe for permanent Democratic government.

Footnote: The story of George Washington, on being accused of chopping down a cherry tree, saying, “I can’t tell a lie, Pa. You know I can’t tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet,” was itself a lie, made up by an early biographer, Mason Locke Weems.

Thoughts on James Garfield - WaPo Editorial

James Garfield (1851-1881)

James Garfield, ahead of his time

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By Editorial Board

The Washington Post

February 17, 2013

[For the briefest time, President Garfield was an inspiration.]
 

Most of our presidents languish in a cloud of national historical vagueness, especially those who held the office in its first century. For one thing, there were so many of them, which is what happens when republics don’t grant power for more than four years at a time. And, except for Abraham Lincoln, so few of them make really good movie material. Lincoln, of course, is in theaters everywhere in this 150th anniversary year of Emancipation, but the decades that came after that glorious episode in our history don’t seem to offer much hope for an honest sequel or another admirable president to portray.

There is one, though, who’s worth a thought on this holiday, Presidents’ Day, which is usually devoted to Washington, Lincoln and blockbuster sales events. You may have passed by the memorial to him at the foot of Capitol Hill — it’s an elaborate thing that has one large standing statue of the president and three smaller ones representing earlier stages of his eventful life. 

He was James A. Garfield, who may have been the best president we never had, or hardly had. Garfield was fatally wounded only months into his presidency by a deranged office seeker with a handgun, and the memorials to him — statuary, parks, streets, schools here in Washington and elsewhere — reflect not just the nation’s grief over his martyrdom but also a genuine admiration felt across a great part of the country and especially among its most downtrodden. 

Garfield was a poor boy (last of the log cabin presidents) who lost his father early, worked his way through school, and went on to become a professor, Civil War general, businessman and congressman. 

He was chosen for the 1880 Republican presidential nomination even though he didn’t seek it and tried to dissuade the delegates at the deadlocked convention from stampeding to him. (Talk about a story line that would test the credulity of modern American audiences.) And he took office reluctantly, sensing that he would never see his Ohio farm again.

Garfield was an upright man but human, and he made mistakes and enemies here and there. But he was a forceful and widely respected advocate for what he believed in, inspired trust among many and felt strongly on the great issue of his day — the future of newly emancipated Americans. He was also a powerful orator, and in his inaugural address he delivered an impassioned defense of civil rights, the likes of which was not to be made by another American president for nearly a century.

“The elevation of the negro race from slavery to the full rights of citizenship is the most important political change we have known since the adoption of the Constitution of 1787,” he said. “NO thoughtful man can fail to appreciate its beneficent effect upon our institutions and people. It has freed us from the perpetual danger of war and dissolution. It has added immensely to the moral and industrial forces of our people. It has liberated the master as well as the slave from a relation which wronged and enfeebled both. It has surrendered to their own guardianship the manhood of more than 5,000,000 people, and has opened to each one of them a career of freedom and usefulness. It has given new inspiration to the power of self-help in both races by making labor more honorable to the one and more necessary to the other. The influence of this force will grow greater and bear richer fruit with the coming years.”

There was more along those lines, and it bears reading. Moreover, Garfield appointed four black men, among them Frederick Douglass, to posts in his administration. We are left to wonder today what a president of conviction and conscience such as Garfield might have done to rouse the country and lead it against the vicious new institutions of repression and virtual re- enslavement that were taking hold in the American South, with the silent acquiescence of the North. 

We will never know, of course, what the limits of his leadership might have been, but it would seem, from the grief at his passing and the memorials that remain, that he was a president who left more of a mark on the people’s consciousness in a few months than some others have in four years and more.

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Some Readers’ Comments …

kdalwin:

1:47 PM CST

Garfield was only President for 5 months before he was killed...not much time to really get anything done.

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B2O2:

1:11 PM CST

Wow, imagine how awfully Fox would have savaged this man had they been around at the time. And, like Lincoln, can anyone imagine this guy coming CLOSE to the Republican nomination in this day and age? LOL

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Astorix:

11:35 AM CST

President Garfield was also against the cronyism and corrupt political machines such as Tammany Hall that were corrupting politics in general and the Republican Party in particular. He was replaced by Chester Arthur a former party hack who loved his big buffets and didn't accomplish too much.
The assassination of President Garfield was such a tragedy and the fourth biggest what if
behind Lincoln, FDR, Kennedy.

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DurangoJeff:

11:02 AM CST

Nice counterpoints to this article.
130 years after Garfield's death, resentment over the loss of white privilege is alive and well.

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seismic-2:

10:32 AM CST

In high school we were taught that Garfield devised a unique proof of the Pythagorean theorem, which you can read here:
http://science.kennesaw.edu/~sellerme/sfehtml/clas.
As a congressman, Garfield was a close friend of the renowned astronomer Simon Newcomb of the US Naval Observatory, whose career he championed. With his fluency in Greek and Latin, he was truly a Renaissance man.

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moderatedonald:

9:17 AM CST

A very good book about President Garfield, his assassin and the doctors that were complicit in his death is "Destiny of the Republic" by Candice Millard. I would recommend it if anyone wants additional information about President Garfield.

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