FLOTSAM & JETSAM

SWAMPOODLE REPORT

2008-05-08T16:06:00.000-04:00

Sam Smith

It's easy to understand why Obama supporters and Democratic officials would like to see the primary battle brought to an end. Less clear is why the conventional media feels the same way. Under the rules of traditional journalism a fight is always better than its resolution. The former can last forever; the latter is stale news in a day or two.

But ever since the media became indentured servants of the powerful, this is no longer true. As soon as it seemed Obama would win the nomination, the media was out to show it recognized the fact and Clinton, like a bleeding, losing canine in a dog fight, was to be put to rest. Little things like the practice of democracy and the intrinsic purpose of even having a convention are placed aside out of respect for the presumptive winner.

You see this same creepy coddling of power in the way the media makes fun of third party candidates, worthy causes that lack major power, or singers who get kicked off American Idol. I always thought satire and ridicule were meant to be used against the powerful and not the weak, but that's far from the majority media view. Let's hope the political media doesn't start covering sports events. You'd end up paying for nine innings and only getting five.

Admittedly it is all getting pretty dull. But if you're going to insist that the Democrats' major concern is whether they are led by a black or a woman, there isn't much to talk about after a couple of months. The candidates approached this campaign like auto salesmen offering different models. So some voters said, "Hey, I like the black" or "I prefer the more feminine look" and after that, the conversation was pretty much over.

What they forgot was that other voters couldn't afford any car or had other matters on their mind, like health care, pensions, or home foreclosures. Lost in the shuffle was that both candidates claimed to want to get us out of Iraq but were vague about how and how much. One wanted to attack Pakistan while the other preferred obliterating Iran. Both favored programs that subsidized the health insurance industry by requiring voters to be its customers and neither offered any economic programs that were particularly encouraging.

A less evasive approach to real issues might have helped either candidate in the primaries and still could work in the general election. But that would mean reaching out beyond one's natural constituency and being more than just another brand. It would mean doing so more substantively than standing on the back of pickup trucks or eating cheese steak sandwiches with a slight frown on your face.

One of the basic problems the Democrats have is that much of their liberal constituency views with contempt much of the constituency the party needs to win. You don't have to own a rifle or go to church to reach those who do. But you do have to prove to others that you have the policies and the will to help them. And you have to care enough about those different from yourself to want to try.

THE CORPORATE CURSE

2008-05-07T15:58:00.003-04:00

How business culture dragged America down with it

Sam Smith

FIFTY YEARS ago, America was just a decade past the last major war it would ever win. The length of the average work week was down significantly from the 1930s but real income had been soaring and would continue do so through the 1970s. We had a positive trade balance and the share of total income gained by the top 1% of the country was only around 8%, down from 24% in the 1930s.

As Jermie D. Cullip describes it:

"From 1950 to 1959, the total number of females employed increased by 18%. The standard of living during the fifties also steadily rose. Most people expected to own a car and a house, and believed that life for their children would be even better. . . The number of college students doubled. Getting a college education was no longer for the rich or elite

"The decade of the fifties was a decade of major breakthroughs in technology. James Watson and Francis Crick won the Nobel Prize for decoding the molecular structure of DNA. Tuberculosis had all but disappeared, and Jonas Salk's vaccine was wiping out polio in the United States. . .

"Over the decade the housing supply increased 27 percent . . . Growth in the economy also led to increasing popularity of other financial intermediaries. Life insurance companies flourished for the first half of the decade and a large number of new private firms entered the market to absorb the excesses of personal savings. Savings and Loan Association holdings of mortgage loans during the decade clearly demonstrate the boom in construction at this time. In 1950 $13.6 billion was held rising to $60.1 billion in 1960. Another important growth in the 1950s capital markets was in pension funds. This industry grew from $11 billion in 1950 to $44 billion in 1960.

"By mid- 1955, the country had pulled out of the previous year's recession and gross national product was growing at a rate of 7.6 percent. The boom was so great that the budget for 1956 predicted a surplus of $4.1 billion. With the surges in production and the economy, the 1950s is often recognized as the decade that eliminated poverty for the great majority of Americans. Over the decade, GNP per capita almost doubled and the public welfare reacted accordingly as the cost of living index rose by just 1 percent and unemployment dropped to 4.1 percent'"

All in all not a bad decade to be in if you were running a business. So much so, in fact, that some began griping about it all in books like The Organization Man and plays like Death of a Salesman.

But here is the truly amazing part - given all we have been taught in recent years: America did it all as its universities turned out less than 5,000 MBAs a year.

By 2005 these schools graduated 142,000 MBAs. In the other words, in the 1950s it would take two centuries to produce a million MBAs. By 2005, with huge trade and budget deficits, a disappearing auto industry, the most costly and disastrous war since the mid 19th century, a growing gap between rich and poor, a constantly projected inability to care for our ill or elderly and a pessimism repeatedly confirmed in polls, we could produce a million MBAs in only seven years.

There are plenty of worthy arguments to be made correlating the rise of business school culture with the decline of the our economy. For example, in the period that corporate culture has been in ascendance - roughly since the Reagan years - wages of lower income workers have declined, the ratio of executive to worker pay has soared, the real value of the minimum wage has fallen by almost a third, total hours worked has increased, percent of jobs with pensions has dropped, our balance of payments has become increasingly negative, the top 1% is back to getting 21% of all income and the age at which one receives Social Security has increased.

A few years back I put it this way: "A cursory examination of American business suggests that its major product is wasted energy. Compute all the energy loss created by corporate lawyers, Washington lobbyists, marketing consultants, CEO benefits, advertising agencies, leadership seminars, human resource supervisors, strategic planners and industry conventions and it is amazing that this country has any manufacturing base at all. We have created an economy based not on actually doing anything, but on facilitating, supervising, planning, managing, analyzing, tax advising, marketing, consulting or defending in court what might be done if we had time to do it. The few remaining truly productive companies become immediate targets for another entropic activity, the leveraged buyout." And this was all before the rise of the killer hedge fund.

But that is not the issue here. If that was all there was to it, we could just wait out a few recessions or depressions and some intuitive, imaginative smart asses would get things rolling again, much as Steve Jobs or Bill Gates did once.

But the business school influence has not limited itself to business. Far from it. Over the past three decades it has done an incredibly effective job of turning all America into just so many more corporate employees desperate for a strategic vision that will foster formulations of actions and processes to be taken to attain the vision in accordance with agreed upon procedures in order to achieve a hierarchy of goals. It has - with bombast, bullying and bullshit - convinced an extraordinary number of Americans that its childishly verbose and coldly abstract culture is transferable to every human activity from running a church to driving a tractor across a field.

One need look no further than the nearest mission statement. But don't look too far back. I checked by Webster's Encyclopedic Dictionary from 1996 and the phrase hadn't even appeared yet. Now it is everywhere.

To be sure, I did find this on the Internet:

"As with many of the terms currently being used in industry, mission statement is a Christian term. In Matthew 28, Jesus gave the apostles the first mission statement:

"'Then Jesus came to them and said, 'All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.'

"A mission statement has always been a summary of the basic beliefs and aims of any Christian missionary organization. So, in summary, the origins of the term go back to AD 33."

Some devoted Christian is permitting his most sacred icon to be reduced to the status of a corporate CEO and his holy gospel put on a par with business how-to books from an airport bookstore.

Admittedly, a few have stood up against the assault. The alternative newspaper Eat the State once had a mission statement that read: "Missions were created by the Catholic Church to subjugate Native Americans in California. We oppose them." And a small computer consultancy business in West London posted a sign: 'We are not ruled by a Mission Statement, we are smarter than that'. But when you start to count the number of organizations - from religious to non-profit to social to political - that feel they can't get along without some corporate gobbledygook on the inside cover of whatever they're publishing, you know the cultural invasion is complete.

At the time of the Enron collapse, I noted, "The last two administrations have been characterized by the invasive influence of an arrogant, autistic, and amoral class of late 20th century MBAs and similar members of the technocratic elite. This class has junked sixty years of social democracy, helped wreck the Russian economy, made every American worker a temp-in-waiting, carpet bombed the English language, trashed every moral concept in their way, and twisted reality so effectively they even convinced many that they were sex objects.

"And they are everywhere. You will find them running schools and universities and managing once great museums. They talk mush, think mush, market mush, report mush, and defend mush. They attempt to make up in certitude what they lack in wisdom; they can't tell the difference between a phrase and a product; and they create infantile and self-serving distortions of economic principles that they declare to be the only principles in life worth observing. They are, in the end, just so many more televangelists, but with themselves as God. Perhaps worst of all, they are without the capacity for shame. Like other sociopaths, they are remorseless."

Since then, it's only gotten worse. As a writer, I pay attention to verbal genres, whether they be the patois of public housing, sports or the board room. Over and over, I am struck by how many have adopted corporate jargon so fully that they are not aware of using it even when describing acts of love or carnal desire. I sit quietly at meetings of non-profits as someone suggests we "define goals and objectives and a map a route for achieving these goals and objectives." I begin to boil when something I love or admire is reduced to a mere "product." Still I know it is a losing battle; the corporate culture has won.

The tragedy is that each of the infected cultures, organizations and individuals once had their own culture that often was infinitely more appealing, intelligent, inspiriting and honest than that which has sullied it. Why is the corporate and business school tradition preferable to that of the church, the artist, the non-profit, the political movement or education? Is politics just branding, is art just a product, is education just a learning process, would Martin Luther King have done better if he had gone to business rather than theological school? Each of these traditions have centuries of wisdom and experience behind them, but all that is increasingly put aside to fit the corporate model.

We pay for this in numerous ways. Some are obvious such as political candidates and public officials carefully avoiding real issues in favor of creating artificial images of themselves, backed by such words as "hope" and "change." And if you don't join with the change huckster, you are accused of "fear of change."

Other effects are more subtle. For example, we now live in the second robber baron era. One of the things that happens in such times is that the wealthy and powerful get to construct huge building and homes. Yet, however we may feel about the 19th century power hoggers, we are still attracted to the architecture and structures they were rich enough to build.

Now, take a stroll through the downtown of a gentrified city of today or drive into the carelessly wealthy suburbs. Which of these buildings would you like to visit a hundred years from today? It's not the architects' fault. As a Washington architect recently noted, her clients won't let her build beautiful places; they are too concerned with getting every last dollar out of the project.

The late activist attorney George LaRoche explained it well: "Once, I think, we knew our greedy were greedy but they were obligated to justify their greed by reference to some of the other values in which all of us could participate. Thus, maybe 'old Joe' was a crook but he was also a 'pillar of the business community' or 'a member of the Lodge' or a 'good husband' and these things mattered. Now the pretense of justification is gone and greed is its own justification."

The result is a stunning lack of restraint. We find ourselves without heroism, without debate over right and wrong, with little but an endless narcissistic struggle by the powerful to get more money, more power, and more press than the next person. In the chase, anything goes and the only standard is whether you win, lose, or get caught.

Thus we find a new breed of mayors and governors who think they are running a large company. They think they should have the power of a CEO and the obedience of those below them. Citizens have become mere customers and urban policy is reduced to economic development, frequently just a synonym for payoffs to big time campaign contributors. This sort of politics is marked by arrogance and indifference to the citizenry with justifications veiled in abstractions such as "change" and "progress" - abstractions will remain unmeasured until well after the offender leaves office.

We find evidence of the damage everywhere. Such as churches that were once involved in civil rights or other progressive causes that now have become scared of anything that might endanger their budgets. In my town a few years back, two activist black preachers moved in from elsewhere. They took over local churches and within months were making waves. I dubbed them Batman & Robin. But it didn't last long. One preacher was told by his vestry to quiet down and the other was removed as head of what had been once one of the most activist congregations in town. Press a minister on what happened to religious activism and it won't be long before the budget comes up. Didn't they have budgets in the 1960s?

The same with political movements. Political campaigns are so driven by money that the media doesn't even notice that it has raised campaign contributions in its stories to a status equal to or higher than the vote, even though the Constitution suggests nothing of the sort. Supposed models of political action, such as Move On or Emily's List, are basically fund-raising and signature gathering organizations patterned on corporate principles. Movements that lead large numbers of people to promote a cause have largely disappeared, in part because their structure is so antithetical to the tacitly preferred corporate model. Could we today have a civil rights, women's, labor or gay movement of the sort that once changed America? It doesn't seem likely without a conscious rejection of corporate values that have been unconsciously accepted.

Consider also the corporatizing of public spaces: sports stadiums, public buildings and museums.. What precisely is the price that each of these places pays to "partner" with the corporate world? And what is precisely the price we pay for letting them do so?

And it is much more than just a matter of signs. In many urban areas, there is a growing interest in what are called "multi-use" facilities, which in fact are former icons of community becoming hidden in corporate high rise buildings. Thus a library or a school disappears from view and lessens in public importance by being treated like just another cafeteria in an office development.

But we hardly notice. One of the things what used to keep corporate culture in check was that, whatever its grandiose notions of itself, its most outward and visible sign was often the salesman, the man Arthur Miller had Charlie describe in his tale of the trade: "For a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine. He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine."

This classic character was so ubiquitous that it seemed every other joke began with, "A salesman knocked on the door and . . . "

Then came television and the individual salesman was finished. A little ahead of the rise of business schools but deeply intertwined with them in creating today's corporaphilic culture. Think of television as the virtual salesman, not knocking on your door, but in your living and bed room 24 hours a day bringing you the products, the values, the language and the corporate inspired crudity that exemplify our time. And those who once caused Americans to close the door, hang up, or say "no thank you," now teach our children, run our government, and tell us what to think. In a few decades Willy Loman has moved from being a tragic figure to being a role model.

The corporate virus even affects the arts, that supposed haven from our lesser selves. Watch American Idol, for example, and count the number of times corporate interests intrude on the proceedings - from the participants taking part in a loudly cheered automobile ad to a handful of listener questions that serve no purpose other than to promote a phone company.

You think you're above American Idol? Think again. More votes were cast in a recent American Idol poll than Bill Clinton got the first time he ran for president. Even if we hate such manifestations of corporatized culture, we can't hide from their effect.

As a musician, I watch the show with mesmerized masochism. Why don't I like more songs? Why does the audience become so hysterical about so little? Whatever happened to melody? Why do looks and attitude swamp talent?

And then Ryan Seacrest slips into a pitch and I'm reminded that I'm just watching another commercial.

Sometimes it's just the little things. For example, I squirm every time I hear someone talk about doing a cover version of a song because I come from a time when songs belonged to everyone and, because they did, there was a lot more singing instead of just listening and screaming and waving your arms around. Once music had been created, it entered a cultural public domain. No one spoke disparagingly of the Philadelphia Orchestra doing a cover of J.S. Bach and when you picked up your horn and played a Charlie Byrd number you were probably doing the best thing you could have done that evening.

But now you find comments such as "Cheap wedding bands and party cover bands are needed in some places" but "a cover song is what a worthless bar band does to make money."

When you dig into this psyche a bit, you find not too deep down more traces of corporate culture. For the tune that has been covered is tacitly considered owned by the first to record it in a fiscally successful way. Centuries of music being created and then being happily replayed has been turned into one more intellectual copyright issue, coincidentally eliminating the ancient distinction between composer and musician.

But cultures don't grow by copyright; they grow by sharing: values, experience, fun, strengths, words, weaknesses and music. In a thriving culture everyone in some way covers everyone else.

One of the most tragic manifestations of corporate overload can be found in our school system and efforts to allegedly reform it. To use standardized tests as the sole criteria of someone's achievement ignores matters such as wisdom, judgment, social factors and morality. If you educate kids in such a manner you basically end up with adults able to absorb a large amount of data but often incapable of using it sensibly in a social situation. The last thing we want to do is to train our children to be as socially dysfunctional as some of our leaders.

As John Taylor Gatto has put it:

"There's a widespread feeling these days, both here and abroad, that America has lost its way, that we've gone crazy, and that school has something to do with it. Personally, I agree. But what change in schooling could restore our lost national vigor?

"Since 1983, the answer from policy circles has been: even more of the same. More hours, more days, more homework, more tests, more college, and a more coercive transfer of officially-approved curricula designed to make classrooms teacher-proof. In this tight prescription, critical thinking, artistic expression, and actual applications of learning have received short shrift. But what if regimented schooling is the disease making us sick and not its cure?"

Perhaps most discouraging is that the very institutions that could once be counted upon to help American correct its mistakes and move on to better days have become as corporatized as everything else. The names are there - environmental protection, civil rights or economic justice - but the character and structure of non-profits increasingly mimic those in the corporate world, propelled in no small part by the demands of major sources of income such as corporatized foundations and the business community itself.

There are, happily, exceptions. For example, for over two decades I have sat on the board of the Fund for Constitutional Government, which has helped back a handful of activist organizations so effectively that on a single day the New York Times cited their findings three times as major substance for articles and once in an editorial. When I try to analyze why this group has worked so well I come up with a number of answers:

- Its business affairs, including the protection of its endowment, are carried out with the care for detail and internal discussion more typical of small business than of a large corporation. Although you'd never guess it from the media, it was small business that originally got America economically on its feet. We were intensely commercial, not corporate, in part because business was one of the few ways one could escape the social and economic hierarchy of the times. Throughout our history it has repeatedly been the little guy with the big idea who has made a difference. But this requires a strikingly different approach, as different, say, as that between the military and a sports team. In small business, there is less time and tolerance for irrelevant abstractions, more attention to detail (what corporate officials would call "micromanaging"), more leeway for individualism and more respect for imagination and novelty. Sadly, fewer and fewer Americans have direct experience with small enterprise and more and more work for large corporations and institutions

- The organization has a goal that integrates the economic and social sides of its being not unlike they used to say of Quakers: they came to this country to do good and do very well. In many aspects of our culture we are repeatedly told that we can't have this or do that for economic reasons. But why, in such a corporaphilic time, are we less able to do what we want or have what we need then in simpler times? One possible answer: the corporate solutions offered these days aren't all that good.

- You can easily test out a group's raison d'etre by attending a board meeting and calculating how much time is spent on matters that, if you had just wandered accidentally into the room, would in no way identify the organization's reason for existence. This includes all discussions of budgets, by-law changes, and most mission statements. Bear in mind that one of the most important American organizations of the last century was the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. It went some 40 years without bylaws or a constitution.

The Fund for Constitutional Government met all these criteria, but fewer and fewer non profits do.

Sadly, for too many, America has become one big standardized test. Between exams we are meant to listen, obey and buy. And suffer the stress that this involves.

But humans have risen against worst oppressions. The main power of this one is that it so unseen, so unmentioned, so undebated. It is time to rise up against the corporate culture killers and send them back to their offices so America can learn to be America once again. We need to tear up our mission statements and start to actually do something. We need to trash our strategic visions and regain our ability to see things as they really are.

The perhaps surprising thing is that if the corporate world stuck to business and let every other aspect of American culture thrive in its own way again, if it stopped trying to boss us around and swallow us up with its infantile words and principles, everyone's bottom line would be better off. We might even feel as good about ourselves as we did fifty years ago.

SWAMPOODLE REPORT

2008-05-06T16:07:00.001-04:00

Sam Smith

Both Clinton and Obama are trying hard to identify with working class Americans by accent, anecdote and analogy rather than offering actual policies the voters might like. Thus we find Obama at a Joe's Junction convenience store in Indianapolis saying, "One of the ironies of the last two or three weeks was this idea that somehow Michelle and I are elitist, pointy-headed intellectual types. . . The fact is Michelle and I, our lives - if you look back over the last two decades - more closely approximate the lives of the average voter than any other candidate. We struggled with paying student loans, we tried to figure out how to make sure that we got adequate day care, I filled up my own gas tanks.". . . This is a pretty embarrassing and desperate routine which, say, elitist Franklin Roosevelt avoided by giving people things like Social Security and a minimum wage. It still might work.

As probably the only journalist in

America

to have defended both Al Sharpton and Don Imus, I'm pleased to note that podcasts of individual Imus interviews are now available from WABC. Recent goodies included Craig Crawford and Bill Richardson, the former my favorite reporter to hear on the air and the latter one of the more natural pols you'll run into these days. The irony of the whole Imus mess is that if the liberal fundamentalists had left him alone after a good scolding, Obama might have been the nominee some time ago, because Imus clearly prefers him over Clinton and reaches just the sort of people the liberals can't. The one group who understood this were the Clintonistas who seem to have been behind the fire Imus movement.

THE MEDIA HAZING OF BARACK OBAMA

2008-04-30T12:18:00.001-04:00

Sam Smith

Watching the missteps, misspeaks and misdeeds of politicians, one thing is soon clear: how important these incidents become is largely determined by grace of the media. There is often no particular connection to the seriousness of the mishap, no clear connection to any political agenda, and seldom a moral purpose. In these situations, the press is often like a drunk behind the wheel. Perhaps it will take us home safely; perhaps there will be a disaster. You tighten your seatbelt and hope for the best.

Barack Obama has recently experienced the media at its dysfunctional worst. The handling of the Irreverent Jeremiah Wright story has no basis in journalistic principle other than laid out by the late Senator Gene McCarthy: reporters are like blackbirds on a telephone wire. When one flies off, they all fly off.

To put some numbers to this, here are the Google hits from news publications in he past month on the leading presidential candidates and their bizarre religious connections:

Obama and Rev. Jeremiah Wright - 13,095

McCain and Rev John Hagee - 295

Clinton and The Fellowship - 37

In case you think that Hagee and the Fellowship can't hold a candle to Wright, consider this Wikipedia note about Hagee, who is close to McCain:

"Hagee denounces abortion, and stopped giving money to Israel's Hadassah hospital when it began performing the procedure. He has spoken out against homosexuality. In his book, Jerusalem Countdown: A Warning to the World, Hagee interprets the Bible to predict that Russia and the Islamic states will invade Israel and will be destroyed by God. This will cause the anti-Christ, the head of the European Union, to create a confrontation over Israel between China and the West. A final battle between East and West at Armageddon will then precipitate the Second Coming of Christ"

And this about the Fellowship, by Andrea Mitchell and Jim Popkin of NBC, two of the rare major media journalists to even mention it:

"In his preaching, [Fellowship leader Douglas] Coe repeatedly urges a personal commitment to Jesus Christ. It's a commitment Coe compares to the blind devotion that Adolph Hitler demanded from his followers -- a rhetorical technique that now is drawing sharp criticism.

"'Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler were three men. Think of the immense power these three men had, these nobodies from nowhere," Coe said.

"Later in the sermon, Coe said: "Jesus said, ‘You have to put me before other people. And you have to put me before yourself.' Hitler, that was the demand to be in the Nazi party. You have to put the Nazi party and its objectives ahead of your own life and ahead of other people."

Coe also quoted Jesus and said: "One of the things [Jesus] said is 'If any man comes to me and does not hate his father, mother, brother, sister, his own life, he can't be a disciple.' So I don't care what other qualifications you have, if you don't do that you can't be a disciple of Christ."

The sermons are little surprise to writer Jeff Sharlet. He lived among Coe's followers six years ago, and came out troubled by their secrecy and rhetoric.

"'We were being taught the leadership lessons of Hitler, Lenin and Mao. And I would say, 'Isn't there a problem with that?' And they seemed perplexed by the question. Hitler's genocide wasn't really an issue for them. It was the strength that he emulated," said Sharlet. . . 'They're notoriously secretive,' Sharlet said. 'In fact, they jokingly call themselves the Christian Mafia. Which becomes less of a joke when you realize that they really are dedicated to being what they call an invisible organization.'"

So here we have three presidential candidates with substantial ties to dubious religious figures, but only one of them gets pilloried in the media for it.

Why?

One answer is because Obama is going through a special fraternity hazing to see whether he really the sort of fellow the establishment wants to have as its first black leader. Watching Obama struggle awkwardly with the Wright problem, I was reminded of Sammie Davis Jr playing golf with Ronald Reagan. "Do you want a handicap?" Reagan asked.

"Look," replied Davis, "I'm a one-eyed black Jew. What more of a handicap do I need?"

But Obama isn't just playing golf.

There is a long tradition of testing black leaders in this way. Under Clinton, for example, Lani Guinier flunked. And as with Obama, it is not unusual to use the Louis Farrakhan litmus paper. For the media watchdogs of the establishment, Wright was a welcomed addition to the standardized test.

Unspoken in all this is the understanding that there are good blacks and bad blacks. There is Colin Powell and then there is Al Sharpton.

From the start, the Washington establishment welcomed Obama with a sigh of relief. A well suited, well spoken, well educated non-controversial black who would let us change colors without changing policies. The enthusiasm was so great that the big guys forgot to conduct the test.

And then Jeremiah Wright appeared and, through him, the scariest black ghost of all: Louis Farrakhan. You could almost feel the sense of betrayal. And so the test began in earnest. Two months of the most intensive press coverage of an grossly irrelevant topic that we've seen in a long time.

One of Obama's real problems is that he takes himself far too seriously and, in the process, helped his critics elevate the Wright controversy. My thinking at the start was that the last thing you should hold anyone accountable for is remembering what their preacher said in a sermon. Obama might have even buried the whole issue by simply quoting another minister who said of such lectures: "The mind can only absorb what the butt can endure." Or turned it around on the press, demanding of George Stephanopoulos and his ilk: "Tell me what your minister said last Sunday and I'll tell you what I remember of mine." But when you presume to carry as much import as Obama does, such simple exits don't come to mind.

Obama desperately wants to lead the establishment, which is why he so frequently looks like he's auditioning for a lectureship at the Council on Foreign Relations or a fellowship at the Brookings Institution. But, in the process, he fell into the trap the establishment had set for him.

Black politicians aren't the only one to face the hazing. Consider the dismissive, patronizing press coverage of John Edwards, a white southerner with the best economic and social policies of the campaign who was treated as nothing more than an over-expensive haircut. In 2007, Clinton and Obama got included in over 90% of all two-candidate mentions in headlines, while Edwards only got into 15%. And those to the left of Edwards can forget about getting any mainstream coverage at all. For more than a quarter century, the mainstream media has consigned the left to oblivion, all the while calling itself objective.

Now let's look at the other side of the coin: politicians who do things they shouldn't and get protected by the media. The most dramatic example in recent years was Bill Clinton, about whom most Americans never heard serious accusations of drug use, rape and criminal connections. While Marion Barry went to prison on a minor drug charge; the prosecutor who got too close the Clinton drug story ended up living in fear of her life at a secret location. A similar contrast can be found between the heavily covered story of Obama's one allegedly crooked friend, Tony Rezko, and the near total censorship of information about Hillary Clinton's three business partners who actually went to prison: Webster Hubbell and the McDougals. Of course, the latter had no known partiality towards Louis Farrakhan. But then which is worse: sitting in a pew and listening to James Wright or sitting in an office and plotting with Webster Hubbell?

The foregoing only scratches the surface of the one of the deepest sins of the media: cruel and constant coverage of relatively insignificant misdoings by some politicians combined with consistent concealment of much more serious offenses by those who - through personality, ethnicity, ideology or class, or just plain power - are protected members of an establishment to which Washington journalists are desperate to belong - at enormous cost to the rest of us.

BLACK LIKE WHO?

2008-04-25T20:09:00.001-04:00

Sam Smith

Discussions of race and gender have overwhelmed the presidential campaign - or national conversation as the yammerers like to put it. But they show little sign of helping people seeking the right choice of candidate. One reason is quite simple. As the community organizer Saul Alinsky explained once, "When the poor get power, they'll be shits like everyone else." The same is true of blacks, women and blind, dyslectic Latvians.

Thus, being either ethnically prejudiced against a presidential candidate or enthused because of that candidate's genome misses the point. It is power itself that more likely calls the shot.

For example, in my home town of Washington DC, over the past decade two black Democratic mayors, with the help of Democratic black and women city council members, have:

Closed the city's public hospital

Torn down much of the city's public housing

Emasculated the elected school board and turned much of the public school system over to private charter schools.

Encouraged in numerous ways the socio-economic cleansing of the city and its neighborhoods.

Outsourced its prisoners to the federal system, meaning that nonviolent inmates may be thousands of miles away from home and relatives.

Disrupted a taxi cab system which was the largest per capita in the country and the only major one in which a majority of drivers owned their cabs.

It is true that some of these efforts were enabled by a federal takeover of the city in the 1990s backed by a white president name Clinton, but he had considerable help from our black female non-voting delegate in Congress and his own black budget and management aide, Franklin Raines.

Raines, the son of Seattle janitors, went to Harvard College, Harvard Law and to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He recently agreed to pay $24.7 million to escape further actions over his misdeeds as vice chair of Fannie Mae two years after a federal suit had been filed against him to recover some or all of $50 million he received thanks to accounting "errors" that vastly increased bonuses for top executives like him. To get some idea of how much this is, consider that Wesley Snipes is headed for a three year jail term for the accounting error of not filing personal income taxes that involved about 7% of the amount in the Raines case. So even among the powerful there are gradations.

The reason the Washington example is useful is because, literally being a U.S. colony, it has a long history of being the canary in the mine shaft of American politics, both for the good and the bad. On the good side, for example, Lincoln signed a DC Emancipation Act nine months before the federal one. On the bad side, DC is used as a dumping ground for crummy ideas that congress members can't get approved in their own districts.

For some years now, the story of Washington has been one of subtly brutal treatment of its underclass. For example, despite an alleged urban renaissance, from 1989 to 2006 the poverty rate increased by one third - from 15% to 20% even as services were declining.

In comparison, between 1980 and 1989 the poverty rate actually fell 20%. The mayor was also black but of a sort white liberals have no problem ridiculing: Marion Barry. In fact, under Barry, conditions for lower income residents, blacks, women and gays all improved despite his drug habit. And while the Washington Post missed no opportunity to trash Barry, to this day it covers for Raines. Similarly, while blacks and whites working to save basic services for the city's less wealthy wander in the wilderness, the upscale crowd and the Post still backs Mayor Fenty to the hilt.

So even among the powerful there are gradations. Distinctions are easily made by white liberals between a Barry and a Fenty, or a Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama, but that is considered safe because they involve class and style rather than ethnicity. Change the names to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and you have a whole new game.

Providing some scientific support for Lord Acton's remark about the corruption of power, psychology professor Dacher Keltner in the magazine Greater Good writes:

"Unfortunately, this is not entirely a myth, as the actions of Europe's monarchs, Enron's executives, and out-of-control pop stars reveal. A great deal of research-especially from social psychology-lends support to Acton's claim, albeit with a twist: Power leads people to act in impulsive fashion, both good and bad, and to fail to understand other people's feelings and desires.

"For instance, studies have found that people given power in experiments are more likely to rely on stereotypes when judging others, and they pay less attention to the characteristics that define those other people as individuals. Predisposed to stereotype, they also judge others' attitudes, interests, and needs less accurately. One survey found that high-power professors made less accurate judgments about the attitudes of low-power professors than those low-power professors made about the attitudes of their more powerful colleagues. . .

"A great deal of research has also found that power encourages individuals to act on their own whims, desires, and impulses. When researchers give people power in scientific experiments, those people are more likely to physically touch others in potentially inappropriate ways, to flirt in more direct fashion, to make risky choices and gambles, to make first offers in negotiations, to speak their mind, and to eat cookies like the Cookie Monster, with crumbs all over their chins and chests.

"Perhaps more unsettling is the wealth of evidence that having power makes people more likely to act like sociopaths. High-power individuals are more likely to interrupt others, to speak out of turn, and to fail to look at others who are speaking. They are also more likely to tease friends and colleagues in hostile, humiliating fashion. Surveys of organizations find that most rude behaviors-shouting, profanities, bald critiques-emanate from the offices and cubicles of individuals in positions of power. . .

"This leaves us with a power paradox. Power is given to those individuals, groups, or nations who advance the interests of the greater good in socially-intelligent fashion. Yet unfortunately, having power renders many individuals as impulsive and poorly attuned to others as your garden variety frontal lobe patient, making them prone to act abusively and lose the esteem of their peers. What people want from leaders-social intelligence-is what is damaged by the experience of power."

There are another problems with harping on race and gender. For one thing, favorable stereotypes about such topics are just as discriminatory as unfavorable ones. Further, race is a racist concept and doesn't exist as an objective fact. The power of this concept, however, can be seen in that Obama is almost universally considered black even though his mother was considered white. No one on national TV dares talk about why Obama is called black and not white or bicultural. And while sex does have a physiological basis, what is being discussed or hinted - namely the alleged distribution of human virtue - is just as amorphous and unreliable. Besides, in a truly non-racist, non-sexist society we wouldn't be so obsessed with the subject.

On the other hand, the question of how each candidate might handle power is fascinating, important and underreported. Both Clinton and McCain have had their sociopathic moments based on the accounts of colleagues and staffers. The sort of anger and threatening that each has displayed hardly recommends them for the 3 a.m. watch. Obama seems to swing between being a preacher or a professor, both roles tending to leave him aloof from some of the audience he is trying to reach, especially those who are culturally removed, whether by education, ethnicity or class. But a more serious problem may be that he will over-parse issues, thus producing insignificant results, rather than that he will bully or manipulate his way to his goal. In this way, he may be far more accomplished on foreign policy disputes than on domestic policy. He may be a new Jimmy Carter, who in the end did better overseas than on Capitol Hill.

Obama may also imitate Carter in being a transitional figure. The Carter administration was a bridge over which America crossed, leaving the New Deal and Great Society behind and moving into the brutal capitalism of Reagan, Bush and Clinton. Just as Carter's failure helped bring Reagan, so Obama's weaknesses may help to revive progressive politics.

These are just guesses, but they raise a far more important and useful topic than race or gender because, yes, Hillary Clinton is a woman, but like who? And Obama is considered black - but black like who? And we're not helping either come up with the right answer by reducing the race to a choice as puerile as selecting your favorite brand in a supermarket aisle. Likewise the seeming indifference of Democrats to what sort of black Obama would be or woman Clinton would be.

In the end, it makes a lot more sense to talk about real things, like who's going to end the war and the recession, and who's going to end their administration with honor. The danger, in the alternative, is to discover too late that you bought what was on the outside of the box and not what was actually in it.

DEMOCRATIC PARTY: HOUSE OF PANCAKE MAKEUP

2008-04-21T15:00:00.001-04:00

Sam Smith

Watching Clinton and Obama debate the other evening, I recalled a video I had seen in the 1990s of DC City Council chair John Wilson speaking to a class of University of DC students - some slouching, some with hats precisely askew, some adjusting their carefully contrived facial expression - and telling them that attitude wouldn't take them far in life. Wilson knew; the one time civil rights activist had made it far and it had taken a lot more than attitude.

I wish that Clinton and Obama had heard him because both candidates have constructed campaigns that are extraordinarily egocentric, overburdened with image manipulation and devoid of that arcane element known as issues that one used to find in campaigns. Of course, they are not the first to practice this sort of politics; it was, after all, Senator Clinton's husband who convinced her party that it didn't need to believe in anything.

Certainly Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos didn't help matters with their churlish questions. But, among the media, it wasn't only their fault. A few days later Teresa Wiltz raised the level of the campaign with this analysis on the front page of the Washington Post's Style section:

"There's Barack Obama, fresh from Wednesday's debate dust-up, beleaguered but still standing, acknowledging that he's taken some hits from his opponent, some mighty hits, but you know, it's okay, because that's politics. Ultimately, you've got to . . . And then he -- pay attention now -- brushes the dirt off his shoulders. Repeatedly. The crowd leaps to its feet, applauding and laughing. Talk about a major Jay-Z move. People, we're talking about a seminal moment in the campaign, the merging of politics and pop culture: in which a presidential candidate -- a self-confessed hip-hop head and Jay-Z fan -- references a rap hit and a dance move."

Consider the Gibson-Stephanopoulos knife jabs. If Obama had a serious plan to deal with the economic crisis, the environment or public education, even a lazy television head might have picked one of those topics. But what sort of question can you ask Obama? You ask him about anything serious and you'll soon be choking on the abstractions and the babble about hope and change. So it's too inviting to turn to malicious trivia. And if you're a journalist stuck for a lead, you happily make the major Jay-Z move.

Both Obama and Clinton have made themselves the only issue that matters and both are paying the price of it - with more of the cost yet to come.

In one case, the plan falters on the fact that a guy who was an unknown state senator only four years ago has, through the magic of cliches and public relations, transformed himself into an appealing mythical metaphor of multiculturalism. And as he put himself in The Audacity of Hope, "I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views." Since writing that book the screen had remained remarkably vacant, demonstrating at least the audacity of Obama's own hope.

In Clinton's case, we have the myth of her 35 years of experience, largely undefined except for length, although it is likely that the GOP will fill in more of the gaps during the general election should she pull off the nomination.

While Bill Clinton got away with treating national policy as one long television commercial, it is worth remembering that he initially snuck in thanks to Ross Perot. Further, as a con artist, he is far more skilled than either his wife or Obama.

The Republicans, on the other hand, can put up a candidate as intrinsically weak as John McCain and still have him run neck and neck with either of the two Democrats, despite each having extraordinarily passionate constituencies.

The difference is that the GOP believes in something that transcends whoever is running for office. For nearly three decades, in fact, Republican mythology has so dominated political discussion that the media and the public accept much of it as the norm, witness in the war on terror and the limitless virtues of capitalism.

The fact that the GOP is wrong, heartless, stupid and mean about much of this merely adds power to the argument that it helps to believe in something.

Ever since Bill Clinton dismantled the Democratic belief system, his party has virtually forgotten what it thinks. It has no comprehensible plan for the economy, the environment, the Iraqi war, cities, education or who's coming for dinner. It has become just another House of Pancake Makeup, presenting what it believes will look good on television.

But if it is enough that Clinton is the icon of feminism and Obama the image of a new, younger, hipper America, why aren't they doing better?

Obama gave part of the answer, unintentionally, with his bitter analysis of small town America. Like any good postmodernist he could deconstruct the problem; he just couldn't reconstruct an alternative. And so he reduced the people he was meant to be helping to just so many more subtexts.

If the Democrats really want to win this election they have to come up with better reasons than Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. And they need the Obamas and the Clintons of the party to be able to express these reasons in a passionate, convincing manner that will appeal to voters. Among the useful side effects of this: who ate dinner with Obama ten years ago becomes far less interesting.

It shouldn't be that hard to argue that collapsing pension plans are more important than a few married gays in the neighborhood. Or that poor healthcare kills more people than abortion. Or that retrofitting America so our children won't have to live in an ecological desert isn't a bad idea.

But until people in the party's high places come to believe in something, the Democrats will continue to wallow their apathy over issues and wonder why the GOP does so well. And their perfect candidates will continue to lose and they will continue to wake up the day after the election mumbling, "It isn't fair"

FDR's campaign manager, Jim Farley, would sometimes tell unhappy members of his party: "Just remember, behind a Democratic candidate, no matter how bad, are other Democrats. But behind a Republican candidate, no matter how good, are other Republicans."

It was a good line because in those days everyone knew what a Democrat stood for. Today, nobody does.

LIVE WITH THE ELITE, DIE WITH THE ELITE

2008-04-15T18:49:00.001-04:00

SAM SMITH

Sure, Obama is an elitist. I thought it the first time I saw him. The tone, the dress, the moves, the constant pretense of being in deep thought, the patronizing explanation replacing impassioned argument. Another smart-ass from an Ivy League law school. The ones that talk grandly and carry a little feather. We've got a lot of them in Washington.

That's why many white liberals went for him. He was comfortably familiar in all but hue. They treat him like a prophet but in fact he's just another of the black ivies who are riding the political waves these days. For Obama and Patrick Deval it was Harvard, for Mayor Nutter of Philadelphia it was the Wharton School at Penn, for DC's Mayor Fenty is was Oberlin and for Newark's Cory Book it was Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. Not bad if you can't have a mother who was Irish or latino.

But it's not as politically wonderful as it seems to some. St. Barack still can't get comfortably past one of the sleaziest politicians in his party's modern history and shows up weakly in matches against a guy who hasn't done anything worth remembering since Vietnam. His purported magnificence somehow fails to make the same impression at the polls as it does at the rallies and fundraisers of the well committed.

That's not surprising but it's worth noting and suggests a bit more humility in the Obama camp wouldn't hurt.

Of course, humility is not highly valued there. After all, it takes something beyond ordinary self-confidence to move from state senator to presidential candidate without even finishing your freshman term in the Senate.

On the other hand, Obama's not a corrupt and conniving cad nor a decrepit warrior looking for another dogfight, so it looks like he's the best we’re going to get.

And it's not totally his fault that he sees himself as God's gift to his party and his country. His elitism is not really the problem; it is the elitism of those who convinced him of this: the white liberals.

These are the people who couldn't stand John Edwards, the candidate who came closest to the New Deal and Great Society values of any Democratic leader in decades. But his policies didn't move them, only his accent and haircut.

This is not a new problem. I wrote about it almost two decades ago:

Today's liberals seem to lack a sense of politics as war, in which one constantly rearranges the order of battle to win one's ultimate objective. They see politics more as a secular form of religion in which success is judged not by societal change but by the rigor with which the faith is maintained. They are political fundamentalists and, like religious fundamentalists, as far removed from their liberal heritage as Pat Robertson is from Jesus.

As with the religious fundamentalists, the liberal true believers often miss the point. The canon becomes particularized and heavily a matter of style and form. They know how to speak like liberals to other liberals but not how to talk to the rest of the world.

The result is a strange distortion of liberal priorities. Gut issues of immense potential popularity such as health, housing, job creation and education are left by the wayside in favor of issues that, no matter how worthy they may be, are most likely to alienate liberalism from the largest number of Americans.

This then is Obama's problem now: not so much that he's an elitist but that he's surrounded by them, funded by them, guided by them - and for too long has been trying to imitate them. If Ed Rendell was not so foolishly infatuated with the latest pretender to the Bush-Clinton duopoly, he might take Obama aside and give him a few lessons in talking like a real person again. Look at what a good job Rendell is doing making Clinton sound like one.

But Obama doesn't seem blessed by that sort of advice. Both his white liberal and black constituencies love him too much for getting this far and wouldn't think of suggesting that he dismount his great stallion and reach out beyond the Ebenezer Baptist - Harvard Law axis to people who are seeking something more.

It wouldn't be hard. He could join a majority of doctors in this country and support single payer health insurance. He could go after usurious interest rates. He could propose a housing policy in which the government become equity partners with less wealthy home buyers and recovered its share at sale.

Hell, he could take just one position without a dozen conditions and it would probably help.

But instead, it looks like he will continue to be the man his fans adore and the rest can't quite figure out.

That's not the best way to win an election.

JAZZ: COOLER AND CHEAPER THAN WAR

2008-04-13T09:51:00.003-04:00

Sam Smith

A HALF CENTURY AGO , jazz musician Dave Brubeck became a star in an anomaly: some American foreign policy that actually worked. He recently was in Washington celebrating his participation in the Jazz Ambassadors program of the 1950s,which sent musicians abroad to show a different side of America. Among the other participants: Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Thelonius Monk, Benny Goodman and Miles Davis.

In 1958, Brubeck visited 12 countries, including Poland, Turkey, East and West Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, Iran and Iraq. As Brubeck explained it, "We were out 120 days without a day off, and it was rough travel. The water wasn't fit to drink, but you got so thirsty, you drank it. The State Department didn't want us to come home. They wanted us to stay out. They cancelled our concerts here at home."

In an interview with National Endowment for the Arts chair Dana Gioia several years ago, Brubeck told how the Voice of America had been his warm-up band: "Most of the people, when they spoke to you in English, sounded like Willis Conover from the Voice of America. His show came on every night worldwide. . . To this day . . . you can hear his voice. In Russia, people sound like Willis. If you listened to my recordings in the Soviet Union during the darkest days of the Cold War, you could be sent to Siberia or worse. They listened to my records, and they called it 'Jazz in Bones.' Using X-ray plates, they could record Willis Conover and get a fairly good recording. If you were caught with that, you were dead. But the doctors and the nurses and the students would very carefully listen to these recordings, and they had underground jazz meetings all the time."

Listening to Brubeck recall his tour under the prodding of Hedrick Smith at a Library of Congress event the other evening, it was clear that Brubeck had added his own flair for diplomacy. And not just from the stories. The Brubeck Institute Quintet played tunes between the anecdotes. The musicians were all 18-20 years old but the 87-year old Brubeck treated them with respect and enthusiasm, turning his chair to watch each solo and even at one point signaling to Christopher Smith that he noted the bassist hadn't got his solo. It's one of those things that happens to bass players so they both shrugged and smiled.

Brubeck himself only played one number all the way through and when it was time for his "Blue Rondo" he stood behind Javier Santiago and announced, "This piece is so damn hard that I'm going to have him play it." Santiago masterfully tackled the opening, relinquished the piano bench to Brubeck for the solo and then returned for the close. You don't see many legends do that sort of thing, especially when it's their tune.

As I watched Brubeck and the young musicians under his influence, I recalled being an 18-20 something drummer and buying a ten inch LP called "Jazz at Oberlin," which I would play repeatedly in my room and on my college radio station show, "Jam With Sam." Maybe I even played it while Brubeck was on his tour in 1958, my junior year. One thing is certain, for young college musicians and jazz fans of my vintage, trapped behind the Iron Curtain of 1950s values and culture, there was no doubt that Dave Brubeck revealed the meaning of life better than your parents or your professors. And if you were a young white musician, it was a sign that there was room for you, too.

Brubeck crossed the generations like it was just another national border in the Cold War. Matt Schudel of the Washington Post quotes the NEA's Gioia as saying: "There is no American alive who has done more extensive and effective cultural diplomacy than Dave Brubeck. Dave is not only one of the greatest living American artists, he's also one of the greatest living American diplomats."

Just the sort of guy you would have wanted to send to Poland in the midst of the Cold War. Brubeck told Gioa, "When we played in Poland in 1958, I had gone to Chopin's home, and I had seen the statue that the Nazis had almost broken. I had been in his home and seen his pianos. So that night on the train to the last concert in Poland, I composed in my head a song dedicated to Chopin and the Polish people. As an encore, we played it, and there was absolute silence in the auditorium. I thought, now I've ruined all 12 concerts. They're shocked that I would play in a Chopinesque kind of way. And then, the place went insane with applause. . . It's called Dziekuje, which means 'thank you' in Polish. Here it is 2005 - that was 1958 - and they still remember that piece."

BRUBECK QUARTET IN IRAQ
[FROM THE BRUBECK COLLECTION, UNIVERSITY OF THE PACIFIC]

It hadn't been easy getting to Poland. A Hedrick Smith documentary website notes:

"The tour also featured a stop in Poland, which required a journey into communist-controlled East Berlin. Because of a State Department snafu, the group didn't have the necessary visas. A tour official found a way to get papers, but collecting them required a risky illegal journey through Berlin's Brandenburg Gate and into communist territory. 'I was supposed to be in [music promoter] Madame Gunderlach's trunk to go through the gate,' Dave explains, 'And of course, there were plenty of signs telling you not to go through. Many people that had gone through into East Germany disappeared for about six months or longer. So I didn't want to be in that position.'

"Brubeck refused to ride in the trunk, but did crouch down in the backseat and was dropped off at a big, non-descript building. 'I sat there for two hours alone in this bare room,' he said. 'And this guy, very shabbily dressed came and sat next to me. He said, 'You Mister Kulu?' And I said, 'No, Mister Brubeck.' And he said, 'No, you Mister Kulu.' And I said, 'No, I'm Mister Brubeck.' So he took out a Polish newspaper and there's a picture of me. And under it, it says, Mister Kulu. So I figured it out - "Mr. Cool Jazz, that's what Kulu means. He thought that [was] my name. But he had the papers for me to continue on through East Berlin into Poland."

The problems didn't end there. Reports Schudel: "Later he climbed aboard an East German train bound for Poland with his wife, son, three band mates and a musician's wife. When guards demanded to know why the Americans were carrying so much luggage, Brubeck recalls, he had to pantomime drumming to explain that they were musicians traveling with instruments. His boom, boom' drew suspicious glares, but they eventually made it to Warsaw."

In India that Brubeck found only one decent piano - a 12 foot grand in Bombay with gold in its keys. He wondered aloud what he would play at a major event the next day. His hosts answered by gathering 20 men who lifted the piano and carried it to the stadium. In Afghanistan it was tougher. Kabul, recalled Brubeck, "was a hard place to find a piano." They located a terrible one, but Brubeck said it was okay; there were "just certain notes I won't play."

BRUBECK IN POLAND

But Brubeck didn't just perform. He learned. In Turkey it was about 9/8 time. In India about a different standard for improvisation that Deepak Ram explained at the Library of Congress event: "We encourage improvisation after you have studied 12 years." Everywhere Brubeck went he not only played, he listened. Out of it came a number of tunes including Blue Rondo a la Turk based on the Turkish zeybek,

And he kept at it. Thirty years later, Brubeck had Mikhail Gorbachev tapping his fingers to "Take Five" at a break during a stalled summit meeting. The next day Secretary of State George Shultz gave Brubeck a big hug and credited him with breaking the conference stalemate.

But then this was a white musician who had won the first jazz poll ever taken by the black newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier. And Schudel tells the story of Brubeck and William "The Lion" Smith doing a tour in the Netherlands, during which Smith is asked by a journalist, "Isn't it true that no white man can play jazz?" Smith, Brubeck beside him, replied, "I'd like you to meet my son."

It was not unlike what Louis Armstrong said to Jack Teagarden on their first meeting: "You're ofay, I'm spade, let's blow."

It isn't that jazz musicians are better people; it's just they have better things on their mind than national and cultural anger. Finding these better things is the quickest way out of human conflict: the commonality of appreciation overcomes fear of the uncommon. Jazz has always been a metaphor for this: a place where everyone gets to solo but only if they also back up everyone else - that mystical blend of individual and community that makes some human societies thrive. One day we may even learn how to make it work for countries as well.

DAVE BRUBECK VIDEOS

MICHAEL SCHUDEL'S PROFILE

HEDRICK SMITH DOCUMENTARY SITE

DANA GIOIA INTERVIEW

BRUBECK COLLECTION

THE EGO HAS LANDED. . . WITH NO REGRETS

2008-04-04T15:07:00.001-04:00

SAM SMITH

No, not the Robbie Williams album and song, but real life as played out by a growing number of stunningly ambitious and self centered figures ranging from the capital's school superintendent to the head of Bear Stearns and Barack Obama.

I first noticed it when I realized I had voted for the wrong candidate for DC mayor: Adrian Fenty. Son of longtime shopkeepers, child of the city, popular in all its parts although few could really tell you why, he seemed like the best of the lot. I put aside the qualms I had after he paid a visit to our neighborhood and stood talking to me one foot away as if there was a 37" HD screen between us. And the I'm the boss manner he handed an assistant his ringing cell phone as he spoke.

In office, Fenty began to treat everyone the way he treated that assistant. As I described it later:

Fenty sometimes reminds us of a fresh MBA trying to prove his leadership by following all the bullet points in some management book he picked up at an airport news stand. He has put an excessive emphasis on proving his decisiveness and virtually none on demonstrating judgment, working well with a variety of constituencies and understanding that certainty has no particular connection with competence.

It has only been a few months and he has already thrown the school system for a loop, ended all democratic participation in it, launched a direct assault on the city's home rule charter, made a number of lousy appointments and agreed to a sweetheart deal for a suite at the Verizon Center that would be illegal if anyone in power in DC gave a damn.

Add to Fenty's misdirected ego is the fact that he was far more beholden to downtown business interests and their guides, the Washington Post and the Federal City Council, then he ever let on during the campaign. There is a reasonable issue of integrity here. Fenty has not only failed us; he also fooled us.

At the time I thought it was just a character flaw. But now it looks more like a pattern. In February, his school superintendent, Michelle Rhee - who has proved just as carelessly arrogant - was on PBS with this exchange:

JOHN MERROW: Have you done anything that you regret?

MICHELLE RHEE: You know, I'm a very unusual person in that, in my entire life, I don't have any regrets.

And then this from Dana Milbank's coverage of the Senate hearing at which Bear Stearns CEO Alan Schwartz testified:

Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) asked the corporate-welfare recipient whether he shares any blame for his indigent circumstances. "Do you believe that your management team has any responsibility for the company's collapse?"

Schwartz could think of no missteps -- not even his decision to remain at a conference at the Breakers in Palm Beach while his firm was imploding. "I just simply have not been able to come up with anything, even with the benefit of hindsight," said the blameless chief executive, escorted into the hearing room by superlawyer Robert Bennett.

Then we have the man who was, until four years ago, an undistinguished state senator from Illinois being presented to us - with no little help from his spin machine - as the new John F Kennedy, if not Jesus himself. There is something about Obama's self absorbed self confidence, total lack of humility or even great consciousness of those around him - that reminds me of Fenty. And if he came to our neighborhood, I suspect that 37" HD screen would come between us, too.

What has he done? Not much. What are the policies he proposes that evoke such a passionate response? Still to be revealed. The other night I watched his Chris Matthews interview with the screaming students backed by cheerleaders at West Chester University and then, not long after, caught the latest American Idol. The grossly disproportionate enthusiasm of the audience was almost identical, but in the end I felt closer to Brooke White, David Archuleta, Kristy Lee Cook and Michael Johns - even Chris Matthews - than I did to Obama. I can't get over that sense that there's something not quite real going on in our relationship. After all, if David Archuelta wins, I don't have to listen to him. If Obama wins, I'm in for four years of something I don't know much about at all.

If you watch Obama, you can easily slip into the illusion that he has actually done something, that he has some great ideas, and that he can solve problems better than his opponents when, in fact, you're going to wake up some night at 3 a.m. and realize that he never really explained how to get out of the Iraq war, how he was going to solve the current fiscal crisis and so forth.

A while back I drew a parallel between Obama and Tony Robbins. It may not have been so far off. Obama's pal and mentor, Deval Patrick, governor of Massachusetts, will be taking time off from his public responsibilities to hustle a self improvement book. Here's how Matt Viser of the Boston Globe describes the project:

Governor Deval Patrick isn't merely penning his memoirs. The book proposal he submitted to publishers reads like the roadmap for a self-help manual, one in which he will celebrate optimism, rail against cynicism, and seek to inspire a nation with his own life story.

The 65-page pitch letter that led to his $1.35 million advance last week from a Random House imprint reveals, in its overflowing optimism and aggressive marketing plan, just how high the freshman governor is aiming when the book is published in 2010.

It details a strategy to sell at least 150,000 copies through a "vigorous media campaign," a nationwide book-signing tour, multiple speaking engagements, and efforts to persuade big corporations to buy the book by the carton, activities that promise to pull Patrick away from Massachusetts and the State House during the last year of his term. . .

The document describes an unusual business arrangement in which A Better Chance, the charity that lifted Patrick out of the South Side of Chicago and sent him to Milton Academy, will play an integral role in promoting and marketing the book through a ready-made network of national leaders, corporate supporters, and pre-scheduled events.

Patrick writes that major corporations are likely to buy tens of thousands of books.

"A Better Chance has numerous top-drawer corporate sponsors - GE, Sony, Coca-Cola, Toyota, Verizon, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, American Express (and many others) - who are capable of making significant bulk purchases of the book and distributing these copies among employees, business contacts, community leaders, students and others," the governor wrote.

In his proposal, Patrick dangles the promise of celebrity endorsers, saying he has the connections to persuade high-profile figures to put promotional blurbs on the book, including cellist Yo-Yo Ma, former Clinton adviser Vernon Jordan, Harvard Medical School professor Alvin Poussaint, and Senator Barack Obama, who by then could be president.

Patrick portrays himself as an inspirational figure who is already getting Massachusetts residents to see their world in a new way and is ready to carry his message to a broader audience. While he boasts that he is able to draw big crowds and energize young people, he says that America is tired of a culture of self-centeredness.

"No matter who or what may try to stop us, we can reshape this world together," he writes. "My life is a living testament to that truth."

Which is okay until you read the actual news about what's been happening in Massachusetts, such as Dan Kennedy's description in the Guardian:

Patrick, a former Clinton administration official and corporate lawyer, has been stumbling since his inauguration. Some of it has been over silliness, such as Patrick's decision to replace his state car with a Cadillac SUV and to order $10,000 drapes for his statehouse office. Some of it involved his inability to bend a recalcitrant legislature to his will on such good-government issues as closing corporate tax loopholes.

A lot of it, though, was about his misguided proposal to build three gambling casinos in Massachusetts. The House speaker, Sal DiMasi, had been signaling for months that he wouldn't go along with the "casino culture" and its concomitant increases in crime, traffic and various social ills. Late last month, DiMasi finally brought down the hammer, as the House defeated Patrick's casino bill by an overwhelming 108 to 46.

And here's where it went from bad to worse for Patrick. The governor failed to stick around for the vote, choosing to travel to New York on unspecified "personal business" rather than stand with those who'd stood by him. That, in turn, led to a story in the New York Times on March 27 - on page one, above the fold! - accompanied by the understated headline "Early dazzle, then tough path for a governor.". . .

In DC, Michelle Rhee, one of the new group of rock star school superintendents who typically come in at extraordinarily large salaries and stay an extraordinarily short time, isn't off to a good start, either - thanks in part to a tyrannical approach to matters general, telling one group of students they couldn't leave their high school during lunch, as well as proposing to close 23 schools and turning an uncertain number of them over for uncertain purposes, presumably some of which will make someone an awful lot of unearned money.

These examples only suggest a pattern, admittedly without proving it. My hunch is here are products of a generation that has sadly been given Clinton, Bush and Trump as role models and so - being among the most ambitious of their ilk - they sally forth with such guides and without the restraints and wisdom that gave power some balance before the second robber era - things like parents who had gone through the depression, moral pointers from both religion and a political activism that no longer exits, connections made through community rather than through Ipod and text messaging.

In each case, there is capacity for good and for evil. There is talent, yet there is an absence of a context for it. There is the ability to lead but only if those around them follow. And they come from a culture and live in a time when a failing Massachusetts governor can get $1.5 million to write a book to inspire others to be just like him. A time when logic doesn't play much of a role, but getting people to forget about logic certainly does.

In the end, if we had more leaders capable of regrets over the past, we might have less cause to have fears over the future.

THE PRAGMATISM OF MORALITY

2008-04-03T16:41:00.001-04:00

During the Clinton years, liberals and their organizations developed a postmodern indifference to moral issues when the Clintons were involved. This virus turned into an epidemic under Bush and hurts us still. Your editor attempted to deal with the issue in this article:

SAM SMITH, PROGRESSIVE REVIEW, 1999 - Both the contemporary right, which views moral issues as immutable absolutes handed down from above, and the postmodern left, which denies the potential for a common moral code, miss the point. Values exist because human communities need them. We are seeing played out what happens when the moral consensus breaks down. Months ago a psychiatrist friend described the Clinton story as being one of the dysfunctional American family. A family that not only can't agree on a moral code, but on whether we need a one at all. No culture fares well under such circumstances.

I have spent much of my life in two places of strikingly different values: urban Washington and rural Maine. I can perhaps best describe the difference this way: I once bought a used car sight unseen for my son over the phone from David at R&D Automotive in Freeport, Maine. I figured I would do far better that way then I would in any used car lot in the Washington metropolitan area. The car made four and two-thirds round trips across the United States and was still worth enough that when it finally gave out in Moab, Utah, it paid for the bus and train tickets my second son needed to get to San Francisco.

I did not make this decision on religious or philosophical grounds; rather it was -- as subsequent events indicated -- highly pragmatic. I simply took advantage of one of the places left in America where a person's word is still considered worthy bond.

Washington, in my time at least, has never been such a place. One of the most distressing aspects of living here has been dealing with people incapable of relationships without intrigue, hidden agendas and exploitation. The Clinton affair represents these defects at their worst.

A study done of Quaker boarding schools and military academies found they have several things in common. There is, firstly, a moral code. Secondly, this code is not an immutable set of rules but rather something that endures the rigorous examination of daily application. Thirdly, the code is a topic of constant argument.

Such a living, pragmatic, regularly debated morality - - quite different from that demanded by the right and shunned by the left -- would make this city and this nation a much healthier and happier place. At least we would then no longer have to ask so often Washington's most frequent and self-revealing question: "Now, what did he mean by that?"