A small thought on an essential fact as 2014 begins:
The other day, after a column on the good and bad of 2013, I got a letter from a reader named Arthur Blair, who felt I’d left out something important. “I believe that just being alive is still the best thing of any year.” I wrote back and told him that funnily enough, after noting in the column that every year has something to recommend it, I’d written “We’re here, we’re alive, made it through another year.” I cut it from the first draft for space. It was obvious enough that it didn’t have to be said.
But sometimes obvious things don’t get said, or said enough.
Mr. Blair shared the experience that had sharpened his appreciation for the simple fact of being here. In August, 1950 he was a young US soldier fighting the war in Korea. It was tough pretty much from the minute he got there. “I spent a long afternoon being shot at and grenaded by a North Korean about thirty feet from where I was lying on the ground and he was in a foxhole. Obviously I lived through that day by the grace of God, and I have considered every day since than as a gift from God.” He went on to serve in Vietnam and spent fourteen years on the faculty at West Point.
Not every day since Korea, he said, has been good – “I have been exhausted, hungry, sleep-deprived, afraid, bored, unhappy. Been through cancer, pneumonia, lonely, whatever. I have also been happy, contented, enjoying my family and work, and so forth. No matter what, I have been alive.” He is now 86 years old “and buried too many friends; but I’m still here.”
“Basically, every day is a good day underneath. No matter what bad happened in 2013, there is always a chance – hope — that things will get better.”
Mr. Blair’s note reminded me of one of my favorite lines from a movie I saw as a kid, “The Long Hot Summer.” Cantankerous old Will Varner, played by Orson Welles, is rocking on the back porch. His children are finally romantically squared away, his worries in that area are over. He blurts out in a burly southern drawl, with an air of discovery, “It’s GOOD to be alive.”
It is.
Where there’s life there’s hope – always.
Thank you, Arthur Blair, Colonel USA Ret., for your nice note, and Happy New Year to you.
Home, night, fireplace crackling. A long, good day followed by quiet, peace and a chance to reflect. The past year was not the most satisfying politically, not the most exalted or inspiring. Republicans suffered an unforced error with the shutdown. The Democrats suffered for insisting ObamaCare be implemented on schedule, as planned, which immediately revealed . . . it hadn’t been planned, was in fact fatally flawed, a bad law. This in turn damaged progressivism itself, at least as it is currently practiced.On the upside for both parties: Republicans proved to be right on the health-care law and have room now to be right on other things. Democrats could, if they choose, see their position this way: They’re taking a drubbing on ObamaCare but the very catastrophe of that program has highlighted the fact that they kind of won the argument on the need to do something big on health care. People aren’t saying, “Get rid of ObamaCare and then do nothing,” they’re saying, “Repeal it and replace it with . . . something!”Democrats are so concussed they’ve barely noticed that people do want health-care help, and it will probably have to be national in scope. Looking at it this way, Democrats have won a 30-year argument. They should wake up, get out from under the albatross of ObamaCare, and start trying to create something that will work. With Republicans, who now have new credibility on the issue.Progress is always possible. The world is full of surprise.
* * *
Beyond politics, every year has something to recommend it. I asked some smart, accomplished people: What was the best thing that happened this year, some breakthrough, some joy, some encouraging sign. It was interesting that with a lot of them, their first thoughts went to the personal.
Chris Christie, elected in 2013 to a second term as governor of New Jersey: “I am grateful that my oldest daughter Sarah got her Christmas wish—admission to the University of Notre Dame Class of 2018. I am a father full of pride and joy this year.”
Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas and Saturday-night TV-show star: “Two and a half years ago I had no grandchildren and started telling my kids that my biological clock was ticking—to heck with theirs. Now I have four grandchildren, two of whom were born this year: Caroline Grace, born on my August 24 birthday (very considerate of her!); and William Huckabee ‘Huck’ Sanders, born in October.”
For Lesley Stahl of CBS News, her primary joy was the same: the birth of her second grandchild, Chloe Major, born in September.
Matt Drudge spoke of the personal too. The best thing about 2013? “It’s the year I discovered prayer. It changed my life. And I didn’t think my life needed changing.”
* * *
Others spoke not of a personal event but of something outside.
Dana Perino, former White House press secretary for George W. Bush and now of Fox News, says the big event of 2013 is a man in Rome. ” Pope Francis. He has become the beacon of hope all around the world, and he comes to prominence just as the world needed him (and for the church’s sake, too—the church is such an important institution in the world).” Donna Brazile of CNN and ABC News, and veteran strategist of Democratic presidential campaigns, saw it the same way: “Finally a pope who believes in sharing the gospel and not throwing the book at sinners.”
Mother Agnes Mary Donovan of the Sisters of Life, a Roman Catholic order based in New York, is overjoyed at the number of young women joining her order. “Who would believe in this age that talented, educated, gifted young women are willing to make a lifelong commitment as religious sisters? This year 12 women entered the Sisters of Life alone, and so many more in other religious communities throughout the nation. Who could measure the value of such graces?”
Mary Anastasia O’Grady, columnist and editorial board member of this paper, found herself thinking of something wondrous that maybe didn’t get quite enough attention. “A spacecraft called Voyager I went beyond the solar system this year, marking a mind-boggling milestone in human progress.”
* * *
Back to politics, for just a moment.
Paul Ryan found satisfaction in the federal budget agreement that he authored and argued for: “We prevented two possible shutdowns for 2014 and made our deeply divided government work at a basic functioning level. In Washington, that ranks as an accomplishment these days.”
Andrew Tobias, the writer and treasurer of the Democratic National Committee, said he’s so grateful he doesn’t know where to start, and presented his answers in questions. “Progress degrading Syria’s chemical weapons and Iran’s nuclear capability without having to go to war? Or a record-high Dow? Or our spectacular first family?” Great friends and good health are important, “But the rest of it can’t hurt.”
New York attorney Lloyd Green, a former member of the George H.W. Bush administration, said it’s good that 2013 is over—2012 was an election year and so “combative,” but 2013 was “acrid” and full of pointless argument. He’s looking forward to some political resolution in 2014. “Finally elections are in sight.” He’s thankful that this year “our country is doing better than it feels. The economy is haltingly expanding. We are ahead of much of Europe . . . this is a reason to raise a glass.”
* * *
Richard Haass, the diplomat and author who this year marked 10 years as president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said the world has some things to say for itself. “I am grateful that Pakistan didn’t fail, China and Japan didn’t go to war, the euro didn’t unravel, Jordan didn’t collapse under the weight of refugees, and the U.S. didn’t default.”
Those were good didn’ts. Here’s a good did.
Jeremy Shane, who runs an education foundation in Washington, found himself thinking this year of his native South Africa. When Nelson Mandela died, Mr. Shane remembered how all but fools thought apartheid wouldn’t end without “a bloodbath.” “And yet Mandela imagined, and with [ Frederik Willem ] de Klerk navigated,” a peaceful transition to majority rule. “What Mandela fashioned stands alone in the annals of national reconciliation in improbability and result.”
* * *
The writer and public-policy thinker Yuval Levin also thought that 2013 was a “rather dismal year” but was happy to go “looking for the good.” He found it in teaching political philosophy to college-age and slightly older students. He was “deeply struck by the earnestness and intensity of their desire to understand the sources of the circumstances we are in,” and struck too by their search for “causes for confidence and hope.” The generation “now reaching maturity in America seems unlike its predecessors in the postwar era,” he wrote. They are “weighted down with heavier worries, surely, yet also relatively free of the childish fantasies imposed by the baby boomers on all who have followed in their wake.” This year he perceived a common “attitude” among those in their early 20s. “We’re dealing them a seriously deficient hand of cards, yet they seem (maybe as a result) more serious sand sober than I would have imagined.”
ABC News President Ben Sherwood also found a lot of good in 2013. “Boston gave us strength, the pope gave us humility, Mandela gave us wisdom, the Bat Kid gave us joy, Robin Roberts gave us resilience, and our troops gave us pride.”
What’s the political word of the year? For months journalists couldn’t settle on how to describe the rollout of ObamaCare. “Failed,” disastrous,” “unsuccessful.” In the past few weeks they’ve settled on “botched.” References to the botched rollout have appeared in this paper, The Hill, NBC, Fox, NPR, the New Republic, the Washington Post and other media outlets.
A botch, according to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Sixth Edition, is a “bungled piece of work”—to botch is to “spoil by unskillful work.” Merriam-Webster says to botch is “to foul up hopelessly.”It’s a good word. It even sounds like what it means, and it fits a headline.
* * *
The sentence of the year is very famous. “If you like your health-care plan, you can keep it,” which President Obama promised from the beginning of his health bill straight through to the time before its unveiling. It was a lie and has been called lie of the year.
Its variations—if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor, etc.—also turn out to be untrue. With millions thrown off their health-care coverage and millions more braced to be thrown off, the president’s promises leave him looking like Dan Aykroyd in the old Saturday Night Live skit where the sleazy toy manufacturer is confronted by a consumer reporter played by Candice Bergen.
She accuses him of selling dangerous Christmas gifts for children, such as “General Tron’s Secret Police Confession Kit” and “Doggy Dentist.” But the worst product, she tells him, is a bag of glass. “We’re just packaging what the kids want,” says Aykroyd. “We put a label on every bag that says, ‘Kid, be careful, broken glass!'”
That’s how ObamaCare looks, like the bag of broken glass.
The president’s statement was simple, clear, understood—meaning it was memorable. Pretty much anyone hearing the promise replayed today would know right away who said it and what it referred to. For all his much vaunted excellence as a speaker, Mr. Obama has never had a famous phrase that encapsulated his leadership—no “evil empire” or “Ask not,” or “We have nothing to fear.”
Now he does. And it encapsulates more than he would have wished.
Could he get himself a new and happier one? Yes. Something like, “Stubbornness is never a good grounding for policy. Today I am ordering the federal government to delay implementation of ObamaCare for one year. I mean to work with Republicans on Capitol Hill to turn around what doesn’t work. I am not giving up and not giving in; we are, however, recognizing and accepting reality. The American people should not be asked to pay the price in anxiety for mistakes that have been made along the way. I am frankly asking for constructive cooperation from my Republican friends. It would be a most unkind party that wouldn’t pitch in at a moment like this.”
Over to you, Mr. Speaker, and Merry Christmas.
* * *
There are also the words this year that were most conspicuous by their absence. They’re the words we don’t use when we talk about health care. Actually we don’t talk much about health care, we talk about health insurance. Fox News’s Jim Pinkerton says the absent words in the ongoing debate are “medicine,” “research” and “cure.” Do you want to make a dent in future health-care costs? Cure Alzheimers. That’s where the cost will be as the health of the baby boomers falters. Insurance isn’t the key. It was never the key. It’s a product. Cure and care are the words of the future.
* * *
Some nice, plain words came from Delta Air Lines.
There aren’t really a lot of nice things about flying. It’s scary, germy, full of delays. They don’t clean the planes as they once did—the tray is not clean and as you open it and see the coke and coffee marks, you wonder if it was used on the last flight by a Senegalese tourist with typhus.
The words you always hear are “We have a full flight today,” and they do, which is bad news because of America’s Personal Physical Boundary Crisis. Our countrymen increasingly lack a sense of where their physical space ends and yours begins. The young, blond Viking-looking woman with the big purse and the jangly bracelets, waving her arms and yelling to her friends across the aisle; the big, wide man who takes not only the arm rest when you’re in the middle seat but the shoulder and leg space . . .
Imagine these people with phones. It will be hell. Their voices will have no boundaries. And they are precisely the people who’ll make the most calls, because they understand their urgent need to chatter is more important than your hope for quiet.
There will be the moment when softly and with a smile, you ask if he could lower his voice just a bit. He will not. He’s on with the office, it’s very important. So after half an hour you’ll gesture to the stewardess, and she’ll say something to the man, and he’ll snap the phone shut but he’s resentful, and you have to sit next to angry, no-boundaries man for another four hours . . .
And so the nice words of 2013 are not “We’re over Kansas or something, listen to what happened on the Green case.” The nice words came from Delta Air Lines CEO Richard Anderson. If the airlines are cleared by the federal government for cellphone use, Delta will not allow it. In a survey they did last year “a clear majority” of customers said cellphones onboard “would detract from—not enhance—their experience.” Flight crews agreed—cellphones will cause passenger discord and detract from safety messages.
God bless Delta Air Lines, and Southwest Airlines has also indicated it may make a similar decision.
* * *
The most arresting words heard this year? A billionaire of New York, in conversation: “I hate it when the market goes up. Every time I hear the stock market went up I know the guillotines are coming closer.” This was interesting in part because the speaker has a lot of money in the market. But he meant it. He is self-made, broadly accomplished, a thinker on politics, and for a moment he was sharing the innards of his mind. His biggest concern is the great and growing distance between the economically successful and those who have not or cannot begin to climb. The division has become too extreme, too dramatic, and static. He fears it will eventually tear the country apart and give rise to policies that are bitter and punishing, not helpful and broadening.
This year I came to understand, at meetings and symposia, that this has become an ongoing preoccupation of the wealthy. They are not oblivious, they are concerned. And though they give away hundreds of millions of dollars to charities, schools and scholarships, they don’t know what can be done to turn the overall economic picture around. Globalization isn’t leaving, industrial manufacturing isn’t coming back as it was, technology will continue to give jobs to the educated, and the ever-evolving mischief of men and markets won’t change.
They are worried. They are right to be. They are trying to think it through, trying to find any realistic solutions, and words.
Everyone is doing thoughtful year-end pieces on President Obama. Writers and reporters agree he’s had his worst year ever. I infer from most of their essays an unstated but broadly held sense of foreboding: There’s no particular reason to believe next year will be better, and in fact signs and indications point to continued trouble.
I would add that in recent weeks I have begun to worry about the basic competency of the administration, its ability to perform the most fundamental duties of executive management. One reason I worry is that I frequently speak with people who interact with the White House, and when I say, “That place just doesn’t seem to work,” they don’t defend it, they offer off-the-record examples of how poorly the government is run. One thing that’s clear this holiday season: New York’s Democrats, to the degree they ever loved the president, don’t love him anymore, and have moved on. They are not thinking about what progress he might make in Washington next year, they’re talking about what Hillary might do the year after that.
My worries came home with a certain freshness after the Mandela memorial, where the United States Secret Service allowed the president of the United States to stand for 19 minutes next to the famous sign-language interpreter who, it was quickly revealed, was not only a fraud but a schizophrenic con man who is now said to have been involved in two deaths. In fairness, the event was in another country and the Secret Service wasn’t strictly in charge. That said, it still looks like very basic negligence, as if no one is keeping enough of an eye on the Secret Service, no one’s checking the quality of the advance or sending emails asking: “Hey, what do we know about the sign language guy—any chance he’s a mentally ill criminal?”
It all looks so lax, so loosey-goosey. In the place of the energy and focus that would go into the running of things, the administering and managing of them, we have the preoccupation with spin, with how things look as opposed to how they are. The odd thing still is that the White House never misses a speech, a list of talking points, an opportunity to shape the argument on TV. They do the talking part, but the doing? They had 3½ years to make sure ObamaCare will work, three years to get it right top to bottom, to rejigger parts of the law that they finally judged wouldn’t work, to make the buying of a policy easy on the website. And they not only couldn’t do that, which itself constitutes an astounding and historic management failure, they make it clear they were taken aback by their failure. They didn’t know it was coming! Or some knew and for some reason couldn’t do anything.
And it’s all going to continue. One reason this scandal isn’t Katrina is that Katrina had a beginning and an end. The storm came, the storm left, the cleanup commenced and failed and then continued and succeeded. At some point it was over. ObamaCare will never be over. It’s going to poison the rest of the administration. It’s the story that won’t go away because it will continue to produce disorder. Wait, for instance, until small businesses realize it will be cheaper to throw their people off their coverage and take the fines than it will be to reinsure them under the new regime.
I’m worried, finally, that lines of traditionally assumed competence are being dropped. The past few weeks I can’t shake from my head this picture: The man with the football—the military aide who carries the U.S. nuclear codes, and who travels with the president—is carrying the wrong code. He’s carrying last month’s code, or the one from December 2012. And there’s a crisis—a series of dots on a radar screen traveling toward the continental U.S.—and the president is alerted. He’s in the holding room at a fundraiser out west. The man with the football is called in and he fumbles around in his briefcase and gets the code but wait, the date on the code is wrong. He scrambles, remembers there’s a file on his phone, but the phone ran out on the plane and he thought he could recharge in the holding room but there’s no electrical outlet. All eyes turn to him. “Wait—wait. No—uh—I don’t think that’s the code we use to launch against incoming from North Korea, I think that one takes out Paris!”
I have to say, I’ve never worried about this with any previous administration, ever.
“They mistook the White House for the government,” said an experienced old friend, a journalist and Democratic sympathizer. We were having holiday dinner and the talk turned to White House management. His thesis was that Obama and his staffers thought they could run the government from there, from the White House campus, and make big decisions that would be executed. They thought the White House was the government, but the government is a vast web of executive agencies that have to be run under close scrutiny, and within their campuses, to produce even minimally competent work.
I have come to see this as “West Wing” Disease. Young staffers grew up watching that show and getting a very romantic and specific sense of how government works. “The West Wing” was White House-centric. It never took place at the Agriculture Department. But government takes place at the Agriculture Department.
Anyway, my friend made me think of a story about Harry Truman. On leaving the White House after the 1952 election of Dwight Eisenhower, Truman made a small prediction about the general and his presidency. From memory: Eisenhower, Truman said, will pick up the phone and say do this and do that, pull this lever, and he’ll be shocked when nothing happens.
Ike was a general used to giving orders within an organization that takes the order and executes. But a government has to be leaned on every day, through management talent earned by experience. Generals can issue orders but federal agencies must be gently guided and clubbed around the head, every day.
People who run big businesses learn these facts of executive leadership early on. So do leaders of small businesses and great nonprofit organizations, and local political leaders in charge of local agencies whose success or failure can be charted.
Most of the Obama people just don’t have a background in executing. They have a background in communicating, not doing. That’s where their talent is—it’s where their boss’s talent is—and it’s a good talent, but not one that will in itself force a government to work well.
When I was new in the Reagan administration, a colleague would worry aloud to me about the bad things he was hearing about the budget negotiations on the Hill. We’re giving away the store, the negotiators aren’t tough enough, they’re throwing in the towel. I tried to study up so I could be alarmed too. But it was hard because my background was Democratic—a Reagan Democrat before that term was popularized—and we just never thought about “the budget.” It wasn’t strictly economic issues that made us conservative; it was a constellation of issues, including taxes and spending.
I didn’t see the trajectory of life through “the budget,” and in that respect I was a normal American. That’s how we were, and are. We hire people to make budgets but we’re not accountants, that’s not the American DNA. Anyway my alarm remained insufficient and finally I admitted to my colleague that the way I see it history is long and textured, and specific and discrete legislative actions rarely make or break a great nation. A series of bad, bad budgets can harm a country. A series of good, good budgets can help it. End of story.
Rep. Paul Ryan and Sen. Patty Murray
Two things have changed since those days. The first is that we used to worry the government would go bankrupt, and now we worry that it is bankrupt and no one’s admitting it. This has created an air of considerable crisis. The second happened in the past few years. It is that the government is now unable even to pass a budget, to perform this minimal duty. Instead Congress and the administration lurch from crisis to crisis, from shutdown to debt-ceiling battle. That gives a sense the process itself is broken, and this lends an air of instability, of Third World-ness, to the world’s oldest continuing democracy. We can’t even control our books. We don’t even try.
That’s my context for the Ryan-Murray budget deal.
Should it be passed? Yes, yes and yes. The good things about it are very good. The idea that Republicans and Democrats are capable of coming to a budget agreement is good. The idea that they can negotiate and make concessions and accept gains is good. The idea the U.S. government is able to produce anything but stasis and acrimony is good. That we can still function even in the age of Obama —good.
America looks like a great fool in the world when we have such division and dysfunction we can’t produce a budget. We were the guys who used to make it work! Now our friends are embarrassed for us and our adversaries gloat.
The agreement moves us an inch or two in the right direction. Let me tell you what that’s better than: It’s better than moving a few inches in the wrong direction! And it’s better than where we’ve been, in a state of agitated paralysis.
It is moderate progress. When the only progress you can win is moderate, take it.
The bill contains a little entitlement reform, a little federal worker and military pension reform. These are helpful and, as we say when wearing green eyeshades, the savings will compound in the out years. The reforms are achieved without tax increases—an achievement.
The deal breaks the caps for discretionary spending but fortunately leaves most of the sequester intact. Half the new spending will go to defense, which could use some relief, and half to pork. This is not ideal. But it’s real and it’s a budget and it goes in the right general direction, not the wrong one.
Some critics have said, bizarrely, that this takes the steam out of a future grand bargain. But where was that elusive bargain? Was anything happening there? It is equally arguable that Ryan-Murray will function as what diplomats call a confidence-building measure. If it passes both houses and garners support in the polls it could encourage both parties toward bigger agreements, such as tax reform. Which America desperately needs in order to grow.
The deal benefits both parties. It allows the Democrats to look serious. They haven’t in a while. It makes them look capable of something that is both modest and constructive—unlike ObamaCare, which is neither. They’re trying to get out from under the sullying of their brand. The policy implications are good for the country, so let ’em have what they need.
The Republican gain is substantial. The deal avoids upcoming fights over funding the government. The Democrats were going to win those, and in fact would have gotten a twofer. Republicans would be painted, again, as shut-down-the-government nihilists, and everyone’s eyes would have been taken off the ongoing disaster of ObamaCare. Avoiding another shutdown is a big fat Christmas gift for Republicans. They should thank themselves and accept it.
More important, the deal helps them look again the way Republicans used to look before they spent a dozen years squandering their reputation. It makes them look like a governing party. Look Ma, they can do something. They can put together an agreement that allows the government to run. They are not only the yelling, hog-stomping opposition, they can still build things that work.
You know, Republicans used to be known for that. It was their strong suit—sober at home and sober abroad. Then they got romantic and confused and decided big dramatic things were the way. But the American people, who enjoy drama in their actors, artists and even lately in popes, don’t require drama right now from their government. They are happy for some calm there. Republicans forgot they were the calm center.
The Democrats meanwhile spent the past five years on a toot, passing multi-thousand-page bills they didn’t read whose consequences they didn’t even bother to guess at. Now, to the consternation of the American people, they have blown up the American health-care system. That system was a road with a lot of potholes and not enough lanes. It needed repair and strengthening. Instead Democrats attacked it like the Bridge on the River Kwai and are now standing there scratching their heads like Alec Guinness, asking: “What have I done?”
That whole mess will have to be cleaned up. Maybe a budget deal will give Congress a little space—and confidence—in which to attempt it.
The deal’s foes can’t just say it isn’t good enough. Of course it’s not good enough! They’re never good enough. “The budget” is just a thing going in the wrong direction or the right direction. This one goes right. Have a good 2014 and it will go righter still.
Tea-party lawmakers and their supporters should recognize an opportunity when it appears. They suffer from a reputation of selfishness. They only have to look to their base, they only have to take care of themselves, and do. The Republican Party must operate nationally and make an impression on a big and various nation of 315 million. There are moments when the tea party has to tug the Republicans right. This is a moment when cooperating—backing a deal that is better than the absence of a deal—would be statesmanlike. The thing about statesmen is they’re taken seriously. And it isn’t only Democrats who would benefit from looking serious.
You have to hand it to Time magazine for managing to drum up interest in their Person of the Year choice. There was a time, I suppose up to about 15 years ago, when people really cared who Time put on the cover as Man of the Year. It meant something. But the media landscape changed, and those who care about the news can turn to a million instant outlets and portals. Time once had that marvelous voice-of-God quality of the great journalistic institutions; now it’s more obviously another voice in the choir, and a politically uniform and institutionally left-liberal choir it is.
But that’s another story. This one is about how they’ve done a good job building interest in the Person of the Year by offering a list of possible choices that contains so many losers that people couldn’t help reacting to it. Cable and broadcast news shows devoted stories and segments to it.
It was clever but also kind of nice and old-fashioned—traditional media carrying on its traditions, legacy media carrying on its legacy.
Time announces its choice tomorrow. Here a quick review of those it won’t be, and why, and who it will be.
• Bashar Assad, president of Syria. Don’t be ridiculous. Nobody likes him. There’s no way to balance the pros with the cons, no way to suggest he represents the future and not the past. It looks like he’s defeated his foes, but what does that signal long0term? He won’t do as a cover: His head looks like it was squeezed from a tube.
• Sen. Ted Cruz. Of course not. He is a living encapsulation of everything Time hates. Once they did an encapsulation of everything they hated when they put Newt Gingrich on the cover, 19 years ago. They had an awful, glowering portrait. He looked pale and creviced as the moon, and the copy as I remember it suggested he was small, cold and spooky to look at on stormy nights. But Time had to choose him: He was the biggest political story of the year, having led the Republican takeover of the House in 1994, and on his way to the speakership. They can avoid Cruz, so they will. His name was put on the list only to agitate the left, and get them popping on cable.
• Jeff Bezos. He had a big year in that he promised drone deliveries and bought the Washington Post—an investment that heartened fogies by suggesting old media has a place in the new world. If the drones happen and the Post begins to rise again toward its ancestral levels of journalistic indispensability, Bezos will be person of the year in a few years.
• Miley Cyrus. Oh dear. Why? I guess for looking like one of Satan’s pigtailed imps. Her choice would cause some controversy but too little to sell magazines. She offends only the sensitive, and they’re a diminishing demographic. To put her on the cover Time would have to laud her specific genius, which she doesn’t have, or deplore her as a signifier of unfortunate trends, which Time wouldn’t do because they don’t want to be caught on the wrong side of that argument.
• Barack Obama. Why? Because his face on the cover will depress sales? Because it will look just like last week’s cover? Because he’s hopelessly overexposed? Because he’s had his worst year? Because his poll numbers are down? Because he’s becoming boring even to his supporters? Because the Democratic Party is 12 months away from beginning to cut ties with him in order not to be dragged down? Because his signature achievement is revealed every day as a disingenuous flop? He is on the list because presidents are always on the list.
• Hassan Rouhani, president of Iran. Nah. What would that even mean? What he is as a leader remains to be seen. What is happening in the political life of his country remains to be seen. Maybe he represents an opening, maybe not. Maybe the nuclear deal is good, maybe not. Even the cover would be problematic. If Time used a photo of his normally expressionless and arguably rather smug face, no one would buy the magazine. If they commission a warm, friendly or interesting portrait it will open them to charges of being useful idiots for an evil regime. Anyway, this is America: no one knows what he looks like or who he is.
• Kathleen Sebelius. More boob bait for cable. Why would they pick her? Because she is one of the public faces of the biggest domestic-policy disaster in 100 years? Because she’s gormless, formless and deliberately obscure in all her public remarks? Because she stands for something people don’t like? Because she proved herself historically incompetent? Because not only is it true that no one knows anything about her but no one wants to know anything about her? She is a functionary, an administrator. She is a cabinet secretary.
• Edith Windsor. She would be a sentimental choice—her personal story is touching, she can arguably be called a harbinger of things to come, and Time is in line with her essential agenda. But no one beyond news sophisticates knows who she is. She’s a runner-up.
• Edward Snowden. This would be interesting. What he did this year was not only important but arguably world-changing. He has managed, like him or not, support him or not, to put front and center the issue America and the West had for a decade successfully ignored, and that is the depth, breadth and implications of government surveillance of the citizenry. That issue has now caused and will continue to cause huge discomfort and debate, and will one way or another bring legislative responses. A fresh look at Snowden’s motives and actions would require deep and original reporting, as would the question of what, exactly, he has given America’s foes and potential foes. Is he a traitor, a patriot, a whistleblower, a scoundrel? Did he put everything on the line for his beliefs, or for something smaller than belief, such as ego? What he has done will have real implications for our future. But he won’t sell magazines. Or rather he won’t sell the Person of the Year issue. People already think they have a position on him. They won’t want to get another headache, not during the holidays.
• Finally, Pope Francis. Who is the person I say will be chosen. Reasons, not in order of importance:
Because he has captured the imagination of the world. Because the Person of the Year issue comes out at Christmastime, and the choice of the pope will have seasonal synergy. Because he is coming up on one year on the throne of Peter; he is ripe for but has not yet received a major mainstream journalistic summing-up. Time will enjoy getting the jump. Because it’s clear his papacy is going to be an important one. Because Francis is different from his recent predecessors in ways Time’s editors and reporters would find congenial. Because pretty much everybody likes him. Because while many on the left and right feel they understand his economic populism, the exact form it will take—its precise nature, and what he’ll do and say down the road—is not fully clear, which gives the story a little mystery. Because the pope is a Jesuit, and Jesuits interest journalists because journalists think they’re smart. Because as a personality he is irresistable. Because he is a good man, not a bad one, and therefore makes the heart feel hopeful and not more anxious. And because he is, to a degree greater than any other leader you can name, exactly right for his time.
We’re not a year into his leadership, but it’s Christmastime and the pope has been much in the news. Let’s look at how he’s doing.
He continues to capture the imagination. When he says something, people look and listen. His approach is not to lecture on the finer points but to embrace, and through the embrace communicate the essentials. An image of the first nine months: Francis on the phone, calling strangers. “Hello, it’s the pope, I read your letter!” He famously eschews the special—the regalia, the car, the palace, the shoes. He wears a cross made not of gold but of common metal. That seems in line with his tastes and nature but carries a symbolic punch: The church should not use its dignity and greatness, its art and finery to separate itself, unconsciously, from the people.
In a world full of loneliness and poverty he says: We are all equal, and equally loved.
Somehow you get the impression that even though he is 76—everyone thinks he’s younger—he’s going to be around a long time. And his papacy is going to be big.
His apostolic exhortation released last week set out general guidelines for the church as it tries to bring people to it. I read the controversial economics section twice, and to me it sounded pretty much like how modern popes talk and think. The world is swept by “consumerism,” by the worship of things, which leaves our hearts “complacent yet covetous.” The desire to acquire blunts the conscience, crowds out God’s voice, and keeps us from hearing the only invitation that will make us happy.
His concerns in this section are classically Catholic and, in their emphasis, economically liberal: “Today we have to say ‘thou shalt not’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills. How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?” That struck me as a rebuke not only of “Wall Street” but of the media, which report the latter but not the former. Francis continues: “Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest.” He scores “trickle-down” economic theories “which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world.” This view reflects “a naive trust” in the economically powerful.
He must have heard about the carried-interest tax break, and corporate welfare.
Pope Francis blessing a man with neurofibromatosis in Saint Peter’s Square, Nov. 6, 2013.
All this has been portrayed as an attack on free-market economic thinking, but it struck me more as an attack on mindless selfishness, greed and go-with-the-flow acceptance of the unrightness of the world. It made me think of Charles Dickens. The pope’s message in part is: Don’t be Scrooge. He cared only for money, had no respect for the poor—he thought they should die and decrease the surplus population—wasn’t the least bit interested in treating his employees justly or with compassion, and missed out on all the real joy of life, until he wised up.
But is Francis saying more than that? Is he hostile to capitalism, and do we see this hostility in the pointed use of phrases such as “trickle-down,” a term the left uses to disparage the idea that created wealth, when invested or spent, spreads and benefits others?
I don’t know, I don’t think so, and we’ll see. I don’t think he’s saying be a leftist but something more revolutionary and fundamental: Be a saint. Be better, kinder, more serious and loving, and help create systems that reflect good, kind, loving people.
The pope has a way of colorfully saying, through words and actions, that the church is on the side of the poor—the materially and spiritually poor—and always has been. I think he’s saying that here: that the Church has a bias for the poor and impatience toward those who would abuse them. And he is speaking not infallibly but as a matter of a worldview rightly shared.
The popes of the modern era have been more or less European social democrats, of the economic left. I’ve never heard a pope worry about the depressive effects of high tax rates, have you? Or the dangers of high spending? Popes are sometimes geniuses but not economists.
And priests are like soldiers. I’ve never met a member of the military who cared much about taxing and spending. Their general view is that taxes should be high enough to allow a great nation to support a first-rate military and keep you safe, end of story. Soldiers aren’t really paid commensurate with their responsibility and importance; it’s not as if they’re in the 60% bracket. Priests tend to be like that, too. They’re not paid much, they’re housed and fed by their order or parish. Taxes are more or less abstract to them. How high should taxes be? High enough for a first-rate country to help its citizens get the good things they need, end of story.
Priests know what’s important in life, and it isn’t money. You have to factor that in when you talk economic policy with them, just as you have to factor in that soldiers would give their lives for you.
Back to Francis, previous popes and economic policy. Our experience forms us. It shapes our thoughts and assumptions. John Paul II and Benedict XVI came from a particular 20th-century European experience. In their youth it was the rise of Nazism, and through their adult lives it was the constant threat of Soviet communism, which was both expansionist—it took John Paul’s Poland and half of Benedict’s Germany—and atheistic. They saw communism as a limiter of freedom and a distorter of the human heart.
The great foe of Soviet communism? America and the West, which had the wherewithal and spiritual strength to resist it. The West brought with it—was rich because of—free-market capitalism. John Paul and Benedict, whatever their private thoughts on how nations should arrange themselves economically, came to have a natural appreciation and respect for what made the West wealthy. They understood its positive utility.
Francis may turn out to be different in this regard. It is possible his appreciation for the wider apparatus of economic freedom does not run so deep. He is from Argentina, not a frontline state in the Cold War, and not necessarily a place—Peronism, corporatism, the military’s influence, the intertwining of money and government—that would give you a dreamy sense of free-market potential. Trickle-down didn’t always work so well there.
We’ll see the implications, if any, of all that.
For now, Francis really has a way of breaking through the media clutter, doesn’t he? At a dinner the other night a smart young priest referred to how Francis’s comments can often be taken a number of different ways. He said, “Maybe he’s just unclear. But he’s a Jesuit, so I assume it’s deliberate.” You mean strategic ambiguity, I said. We laughed because that’s what we both thought. Francis wants to get us thinking about what we should be thinking about. He wants to invite thought.
The president’s problem right now is that people think he’s smart. They think he’s in command, aware of pitfalls and complexities. That’s his reputation: He’s risen far on his brains. They think he is sophisticated.
That is his problem in the health insurance debacle.
* * *
People have seen their prices go up, their choices narrow. They have lost coverage. They have lost the comfort of keeping the doctor who knows them and knows they tend to downplay problems and not complain of pain, and so doing more tests might be in order, or tend to be hypochondriacal and probably don’t need an echocardiogram, or at least not a third one this year.
At the very least people have been inconvenienced; at the most they’ve been made more anxious in an already anxious world. In a month, at the worst they may be on a gurney in an ER not knowing the answer to the question “Do you have insurance?” and hoping they can get into an exam room before somebody runs the number on the little green plastic card they keep in the back of their wallet.
Everyone understands in their own rough way that ObamaCare is a big mess. And that it’s not the website, it’s the law itself. They have seen systems crash. In the past 20 years they’ve seen their own computers crash. They know systems and computers get fixed.
But they understand a conceptual botch when they see one. They understand this new program was so big and complex and had so many moving parts and was built on so many assumptions that may or may not hold true, and that deals with so many people with so many policies—and they know they themselves have not read their own policies, for who would when the policies, like the law that now controls the policies, are written in a way that is deliberately obscure so as to give maximum flexibility to administrators in offices far away. And that’s just your policy. What about 200 million other policies? The government can’t handle that. The government can barely put up road signs.
The new law seems like just another part of the ongoing shakedown operation that is the relationship of the individual and the federal government, circa 2013.
But back to the president, and his problem with being known as intelligent—Columbia, Harvard Law, lecturer on constitutional issues at the University of Chicago Law School.
The program he created in 2009-10, ran on in 2012, and whose implantation he delayed until one year after that election—in retrospect, that delay seems meaningful, doesn’t it?—has turned out to be wildly misleading as to its basic facts.
Millions are finding you can’t keep your plan, your premium, your deductible, your doctor. And millions more will discover this when the business mandate kicks in.
All of this—the fraudulent nature of the program—came as a rolling shock to people the past two months.
It’s a shock for most people that it’s a shambles. A fellow very friendly to the administration, a longtime supporter, cornered me at a holiday party recently to ask, with true perplexity: “How could any president put his entire reputation on the line with a program and not be on the phone every day pushing people and making sure it will work? Do you know of any president who wouldn’t do that?” I couldn’t think of one, and it’s the same question I’d been asking myself. The questioner had been the manager of a great institution, a high stakes 24/7 operation with a lot of moving parts. He knew Murphy’s law—if it can go wrong, it will. Managers—presidents—have to obsess, have to put the fear of God, as Mr. Obama says, into those below them in the line of authority. They don’t have to get down in the weeds every day but they have to know there are weeds, and that things get caught in them.
It’s a leader’s job to be skeptical of grand schemes. Sorry, that’s a conservative leader’s job. It is a liberal leader’s job to be skeptical that grand schemes will work as intended. You have to guide and goad and be careful.
And this president wasn’t. I think part of the reason he wasn’t careful is because he sort of lives in words. That’s been his whole professional life—books, speeches. Say something and it magically exists as something said, and if it’s been said and publicized it must be real. He never had to push a lever, see the machine not respond, puzzle it out and fix it. It’s all been pretty abstract for him, not concrete. He never had to stock a store, run a sale and see lots of people come but the expenses turn out to be larger than you’d expected and the profits smaller, and you have to figure out what went wrong and do better next time.
People say Mr. Obama never had to run anything, but it may be more important that he never worked for the guy who had to run something, and things got fouled up along the way and he had to turn it around. He never had to meet a payroll, never knew that stress. He probably never had to buy insurance! And you know, his policies were probably gold-plated—at the law firm, through his wife’s considerable hospital job, in the Illinois Legislature, in the U.S. Senate. Those guys know how to take care of themselves! Maybe he felt guilty. Maybe that’s to his credit, knowing he was lucky. Too bad he didn’t know what he didn’t know, like how every part has to work for a complicated machine to work.
Here I will say something harsh, and it’s connected to the thing about words but also images.
From what I have seen the administration is full of young people who’ve seen the movie but not read the book. They act bright, they know the reference, they’re credentialed. But they’ve only seen the movie about, say, the Cuban missile crisis, and then they get into a foreign-policy question and they’re seeing movies in their heads. They haven’t read the histories, the texts, which carry more information, more texture, data and subtlety, and different points of view. They’ve only seen the movie—the Cubans had the missiles and Jack said “Not another war” and Bobby said “Pearl Harbor in reverse” and dreadful old Curtis LeMay chomped his cigar…
I had a lot of jobs in a somewhat knockabout youth—waitress, clerk, temporary secretary, counter girl in a bakery (nice—no one’s ever sad in a bakery) and in a flower shop (hard—for hours I removed the thorns from the tough, gnarly roses we sold, which left my hands nicked and bloodied). All the jobs of my teens and early 20s were wonderful in the sense that I was lucky to have a job. Unskilled baby boomers were crowding into an ailing economy; they took what they could and did their best from there. I could earn a salary to buy what I needed—clothes, food, money to go to college at night, then during the day. But the jobs were most wonderful in that they contributed to the experience hoard we all keep in our heads.
The best was waitressing. That’s hard work too, eight or 10 hours on your feet, but you get to know the customers. People will tell you their life stories over coffee. There’s something personal, even intimate, in serving people food, and regulars would come in at 6 or 7 a.m. and in time you’d find you were appointments in each other’s lives. At the Holiday Inn on Route 3 in New Jersey, long-haul truckers on their way to New York would stop for breakfast. They hadn’t talked to anyone in hours. I’d pour coffee and they would start to talk about anything—the boss, the family, politics.
I learned from them what a TSA agent told me many years later: “Everyone’s carrying the same things.” I had asked the agent what she’d learned about people from years of opening people’s bags and seeing what was inside. She meant her answer literally: Everybody’s carrying the same change of clothes, the same toiletries. But at the moment she said it we both understood that she was speaking metaphorically too: Everyone’s carrying the same burdens, the same woes one way or another. We have more in common than we know.
Once when I was 18 my friends and I ran away. We pooled our cash, bought a broken-down car for $200 and aimlessly drove south. We wound up in Miami Beach, in what was then a fallen-down, beat-up area and is now probably a millionaire’s row. I worked at a restaurant whose name I remember as the Lincoln Lanes. Jackie Gleason did his TV show nearby, and the June Taylor dancers used to come in for lunch. They were so great—young and beautiful and full of tales about the show and about Jackie, who once drove by in his car. I thought of him when I first saw Chris Christie, years later. Mr. Christie on YouTube confronting an aggrieved constituent was sheer Gleason: “To the moon, Alice!”
The hardest job I had was working the floor at a women’s clothing store on Park Avenue in Rutherford, N.J. It was part of a chain. It was boring when traffic was light—clocks go slow in retail when no one’s there. There’s no stool to sit on during your shift: You’re working the floor so that’s where they want you, walking around, folding sweaters, rearranging hangers. You don’t have the same conversations with a harried woman trying on a skirt that you do with a tired trucker on his way to the city who decides to give you his philosophy of life.
One thing all these jobs had in common was something so common, so expected, that it was unremarked upon. You got holidays off. You were nonessential personnel. You worked at a place that didn’t have to be open, so it wasn’t. You got this gift, a day off, sometimes paid and sometimes not, but a break, an easement of responsibility.
I suppose the shops I worked at were unthinkingly following tradition. Thanksgiving, Christmas—these are days to be with friends and family and have a feast. Maybe if you pressed them they’d say something like: “This is what we do. We’re Americans. Thanksgiving is a holiday. We’re supposed to give thanks, together.” They’d never trespass on a national day of commonality, solidarity and respect.
You know where we’re going, because you’ve seen the news stories about the big retailers that decided to open on Thanksgiving evening, to cram a few extra hours in before the so-called Black Friday sales. About a million Wal-Mart workers had to be in by 5 p.m. for a 6 p.m. opening, so I guess they had to eat quickly with family, then bolt. Kmart opened on Thanksgiving too, along with Target, Sears, Best Buy and Macy’s, among others.
The conversation has tended to revolve around the question of whether it’s good for Americans to leave their gatherings to go buy things on Thanksgiving. In a societal sense, no—honor the day best you can and shop tomorrow. But that’s not even the question. At least shoppers were being given a choice. They could decide whether or not they wanted to leave and go somewhere else. But the workers who had to haul in to work the floor didn’t have a choice. They had been scheduled. They had jobs they want to keep.
It’s not right. The idea that Thanksgiving doesn’t demand special honor marks another erosion of tradition, of ceremony, of a national sense. And this country doesn’t really need more erosion in those areas, does it?
The rationale for the opening is that this year there are fewer shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and since big retailers make a lot of their profits during that time something must be done. I suppose something should. But blowing up Thanksgiving isn’t it.
There has been a nice backlash on the Internet, with petitions and Facebook posts. Some great retailers refused to be part of what this newspaper called Thanksgiving Madness. Nordstrom did not open on Thanksgiving, nor did T.J. Maxx, Costco or Dillard’s. P.C. Richard & Son took out full-page ads protesting. The CEO was quoted last week saying Thanksgiving is “a truly American holiday” and “asking people to be running out to shop, we feel is disrespectful.” Ace Hardware said, simply: “Some things are more important than money.”
That is the sound of excellent Americans.
People deserve a day off if what they do is nonessential. Selling a toy, a jacket, even a rose is nonessential.
Black Friday—that creepy sales bacchanal in which the lost, the lonely, the stupid and the compulsive line up before midnight Friday to crash through the doors, trampling children and frightening clerks along the way—is bad enough, enough of a blight on the holiday.
But Thanksgiving itself? It is the day the Pilgrims invented to thank God to live in such a place as this, the day Abe Lincoln formally put aside as a national time of gratitude for the sheer fact of our continuance. It’s more important than anyone’s bottom line. That’s a hopelessly corny thing to say, isn’t it? Too bad. It’s true.
Oh, I hope people didn’t go. I hope when the numbers come in it was a big flop.
I hope America stayed home.
And happy Thanksgiving to our beloved country, the great and fabled nation that is still, this day, the hope of the world.
I’m off this week but wanted to join in on some last JFK thoughts. I write just a few minutes before the 50th anniversary of that moment the shots rang out.
The television coverage has been excessive, and some have found it grating. Fair enough, but we’ll never do it like this again. There won’t be any such attention paid to the 60th and 70th; those who were there will be gone, as will be many of those who were not there but remember.
People keep doing “Where I was when I heard.” It is obnoxious, but it’s an understandably human impulse to want to locate yourself in time and space and tell someone where you were when you heard big news. Our parents did it with Dec. 7, 1941. “I was at a football game and the announcer came on and asked all military personnel to return to their bases . . .”
I was in seventh grade at John P. McKenna junior high school in Massapequa Park, Long Island. We were in the halls on our way to seventh period. My friend Karen Strazzeri walked up to me wide-eyed. “Did you hear? The president was shot.” That was too strange to be true. I told her it was probably a rumor but if it was true we’d find out soon. A few minutes later, in what I remember as social studies class, the teacher said the president had been shot. Then the principal came on the public address system and said the president was dead. We were all very quiet. Thn one boy, out of nervousness or idiocy, laughed. The teacher yelled at him, harshly: How could you so insensitive? That poor boy is probably still in therapy.
I remember that night or the next sitting on the lawn and looking up and thinking, “Isn’t it funny JFK is dead and the moon is still there and everything looks the same?”
I watched it all on TV, like everyone else. Later I worked in the CBS Newsroom on West 57th Street in Manhattan, and wound up working with the men and women who’d covered the assassination 15 years before. One of them, Marion Glick, told me what it was like. They all worked double shifts. The writers and producers and technicians, the secretaries and on-air talent, all of them felt they were performing a public service. They had a heightened sense of responsibility, like soldiers. Others felt this too. The second day, local restaurants and diners started sending over full dinners and lunches for the CBS staff, all on the house.
* * *
People debate whether JFK was a liberal or a conservative. He was a politician operating within a party that was starting to go left. He wasn’t that interested in ideology. He was propelled by a belief that of all the available leaders around, he’d be as good as any and better than most. He wanted to win, triumph and rise, and these are not bad things, and he thought that he, along with the best and the brightest he brought into the White House, could handle, with practicality and pragmatism, what came over the transom.
He was curiously passive about his legislative agenda. You always get a sense when you read the histories that he thought he’d always have trouble with those old Neanderthals in the Senate. It took Lyndon Johnson, the least appreciated president of modern times, who had the bad luck to follow Jack Kennedy’s act, to bully JFK’s agenda through. He knew those senators, knew what they needed, as opposed to desired and liked to pose about. He made deals, bent them to his will. Thus came the civil rights laws and Medicare. It is amazing that he gets so little public credit for these things. But he didn’t have dash and he wasn’t a glamorous or romantic figure.
You can’t ignore the sheer glamour in the Kennedy story. Yes it was the first fully televised White House, and yes his friends in the press splashed pictures of the family all over their magazines, but people wanted to look at them—there was a market for them—because they were beautiful and young and sun-splashed. They were like movie stars. The Nixons were not, Hubert Humphrey was not. They were at a disadvantage.
Anyway it’s foolish not to remember that glamour was part of the story.
* * *
Two small points. It is interesting that JFK was celebrated as the first modern president, the first truly hip president, and yet the parts of him we celebrate most are actually the old virtues. He lied to get into the military, not to get out of it. He was sick, claimed to be well, and served as a naval officer in the war. In the postwar years he was in fairly constant physical pain, but he got up every day and did his demanding jobs. He played hurt. He was from a big, seemingly close family and seemed very much the family man himself. What we liked most about him wasn’t hip.
And he was contained. He operated within his own physical space and was not florid or mawkish or creepily domineering in his physical aspect.
For generations after him politicians imitated him—his mannerisms, his look, his hair. Before JFK hair was not a political virtue. After him it was. I remember a candidate for the U.S. Senate in New York who was the first candidate to blow-dry his hair. He had a big swoop of it. That guy ran on his hair. It was his platform. I remember a local New York City political figure who wore a kind of JFK wig, a big strange shock of hair that looked twice as big as his head. And he went pretty far.
If they had to imitate anything I wish it was how distanced, ironic and modest JFK was in the physical sphere. He didn’t hug the other pols on the platform, he didn’t give a big man-hug to the others on the dais, he didn’t kiss everyone and point at the audience and give them a thumbs-up. He didn’t act, he just was. Like a grownup. Like a person with dignity. Like a person with public boundaries who is an actor but not a phony.
