Lincoln and the Questions of Our Lives

Are we fitted into the times we are born into?  So asks Abraham Lincoln in the new film that should be required viewing for all – more so for modern-day Republicans than anyone else.  The Lincoln in Lincoln is the dream of any Democrat or Republican.  A nation so divided as ours is today, riven by intense ideological rivalries and regional, sectional differences, could use an individual who commands the respect of all to ask the eternal question we ask of ourselves with often vague success, How and where do we fit?  Lincoln did not ask the more important question that has dogged humankind since it attained the power to reason, What does it all mean?  No, he asked the one that we should be able to answer, for we do have the power to control our lives.  Incumbent in Lincoln’s question is the degree to which each citizen and resident of the United States understands his or her responsibilities.

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Asking More from Marco

Marco Rubio has gotten himself into a pickle, hasn’t he?  Is the shine off the apple, or is there something behind that Bush?  These questions forced the first of the faux 2016 presidential candidates to show up in Iowa 10 scant days after the election to give a speech.  Rubio officially found out on Nov. 6 that Americans rejected the fearful-anxious movement that catapulted him onto the national scene in the first place.  The Tea party is not dead but it does not have as much of a future as the ink it gets.

What Marco Rubio said during his transparent trip to Iowa last week is not going to cut it for him or his party – or the nation.  The country today needs real leadership – political brinksmanship, even – not the cautious catnip Rubio offered last week.  The country needs more from all of us.  It needs us to be less ideological.  It needs the no-tax pledge signers to understand fiscal reality.  It needs environmentalists to understand natural gas development.  It needs a new integrity.  It needs less media.  It needs a new way to fund campaigns.  It needs a lot more than what we are giving it.  And it certainly needs more from young telegenic Hispanic/Latinos like Marco Rubio who are supposed to be a great part of the future.

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First heal then rebuild

Ceaselessly, the babble goes on about the crossroads the Republican party faces after its rejection by almost 64 million voters.  And, of course, the discussion misses the point. The usual post-election hand-wringing in the wake of a political defeat has gone beyond usual recrimination.  Desperation has turned bitter.  Ill-informed and/or cynical political strategists and pollsters had hoodwinked the party’s faithful into thinking they were going to win an election with a nominee who truly considers half of the nation way, way beneath him.  Despondency has conflated into screeching on the radio about the old America dying.  The resentments that right-wing gasbags with microphones spew into the air unfortunately cloud the opportunity that America has before it.

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More of a Hologram: Lincoln or the Supreme Court?

In my mind the Supreme Court is at the precipice.  A majority of the court has come to personate Mitt Romney’s lack of understanding of the new world around us.  In deciding to accept a case out of Alabama in order to rule on the constitutionality of critical parts of the Voting Rights Act, the court is placing itself in judgment.  No one with a pip of integrity can believe that changes in election laws leading up to the 2012 presidential election had any other purpose – and their authors any other motivation – than to suppress the constitutional rights of certain American citizens whose ballots were to be denigrated if possible.

The willingness on the part of many citizens – and state attorneys general – to engage and use anti-Constitutional means to limit the rights of voters persists, and it can be found in almost any part of the Union.  The most blatant example this year occurred not in the southern states and other localities specifically covered by the Act but in Pennsylvania, which is barely included in provisions related to Spanish-speaking citizens.  The law that sought to thwart better the rights of voters was enacted in Harrisburg, 100 miles from Philadelphia, the cradle of this country’s liberties, and 40 miles from Gettysburg, where the most anti-democratic force ever organized on American soil was defeated, marking a turning point in the civil war between North and South.  To that same Gettysburg did Abraham Lincoln lumber to dedicate a shrine to the fallen of that battle but where, in fact, he rededicated America to the justness of the war and to itself.

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Petraeus: A Reflection of Our Lack of Prudence and Restraint

Waiting for the circus to unfold this morning as General David Petraeus testifies before closed congressional committees ostensibly looking into the terroristic attack on the American mission in Benghazi, my mind races back years when I got into a drag-out fight in the newsroom I used to help manage.  Two of our reporters, egged on by a clueless line editor originally from out of state with little knowledge of Texas, wanted to do a story on one of the state’s most promising sons.  Our story would have taken him down Petraeus-like – a huge loss for a state that can produce the likes of an indicted John Connally, a discredited George W. Bush, a shameless Phil Gramm and the redoubtable Rick Perry.  Texas also can produce a Lyndon Johnson or an Ann Richards, so it does have the ability to generate the exceptional star, which this man was.

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A New Ambassador for a New Time

The topic of immediate concern in Washington is the nation’s fiscal crisis.  Nothing is more important.  But not long thereafter, the time for immigration reform will arrive.  What does immigration reform mean?  When will the Obama Administration and Democrats in Congress draft and propose legislation?  Is the intention to build on the last proposal that went nowhere?  Is there a legalization component?  President Obama should be involved directly, but will he engage?  Who in Congress and within public interest organizations will be central to this drama?  Is there a cost to the Treasury?  What terms are acceptable to discuss in public?  Will the fight be as bitter as over healthcare?  What steps are being taken to assure that the public accepts proposed legislation?  Will all come to naught in the face of Republican opposition and predictable Democratic angst?  Will hard political capital on both sides of the aisle be used to get this done?  Or will one party use it to set up the other in time for November, 2014?

Listed in this fashion, the questions frame the sheer difficulty of what is demonstrably easier said than done.  No one has answers for most of them, except that the Administration will need every tool to achieve success – and develop new ones.

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Before Legacy, Think Opportunity

With the election over, there is no question we have entered the age of the new demography in which the changing internal populations of countries are remaking their politics.  HispanicLatinos, millennials, African Americans, independent women, gays and lesbians and a host of fair-minded voters not blinded by religious fervor or abject racism came together and delivered a good win for President Barack Obama.  The uncertainty is whether the United States will give itself the chance to take advantage of its demographic transformation to secure its future.   In that sense, we have entered a new age of opportunity.  But it is also clear we have entered the age of climate change.  The assertion of the new demography came simultaneously with Hurricane Sandy that should have blasted smugness for all time.

If I may, a personal, self-serving note: If Florida, as expected, is finally given to Obama, it will confirm the call I made on October 29 that nailed the election’s outcome on the button in the Electoral College.  On the popular vote, I was also very close.  I said the spread between Obama and Mitt Romney would be three million votes.  The spread currently stands at about 2.7 million.  You can read that blog at:

http://www.hispaniclatino.com/2012/10/29/channeling-harry-truman-an-obama-win/

Now, after the election, what?  The first few days are important for President Obama and will determine if the nation does push forward.

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Ethnicity and Race Do Matter — and Thank God

Let’s say you are a young HispanicLatino, say, in your 20’s, and you are aware enough to know there are more important things in life than social networking, music, dancing, drinking, friends, entertainment and games.  Let’s say that you pick up on the fact that 57 percent of white non-HispanicLatinos have anti-HispanicLatino sentiments, that is, that so-called Anglos think negatively about you, your family and your friends.  The findings from a recent survey commissioned by the Associated Press and conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago and Stanford and Michigan universities are no surprise to most HispanicLatinos.  But what is someone so young supposed to think – or do?  The answer is to make it about you yourself, not them.  What 57 percent of Anglos think is less important as each day passes and will have lesser and lesser bearing.

Most writers across the country have bemoaned the results of the study.  It is, I suppose, sad – if you live in the past.  A different viewpoint should take hold instead of morose musings that the country never achieved harmonic convergence on race.  It does not matter now that the country never got to some nebulous promised land where skin color and ethnicity blended into some sort of multicultural muddle.  The very point of where humankind finds itself today is that in a globalized world, all cultures matter, and, in fact, matter equally.  The point of the future is that we are going to have to get along despite lasting natural differences not melt each other into some vapid subsistence.

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To Frack or not to Frack

President Obama in the debate on Tuesday made a passing reference to the role that natural gas can play in the nation’s economic future.  The need in a probable second term to accelerate the development of the country’s immense natural gas resources to power a new century of American power and prosperity is achingly evident.  It is incumbent on the Administration to press forward.  During the British Petroleum oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, there did not seem to be anyone in the inner circles of the Administration with an oil and gas background to provide timely and effective counsel in the worst of happenstances.  And it showed.  So there is reason now to make sure that what could be the best is not mishandled.  The country, after all, stands at the threshold of an astonishing economic renaissance.  An effort on the scale of John Kennedy summoning the nation to win the race to the moon against the Soviets will be necessary, for the mission has many environmental and other hurdles to surmount.

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The Debate’s Effect on Arizona: California Here We Come, Right Back Where We Started From

 

Against a backdrop of ever-changing polls, the debate last night highlighted the essential political question for Americans – certainly for Mitt Romney’s disdained 47-percent and most assuredly for HispanicLatinos:  Whether they believe the tiger trying mightily to shear his stripes.  All Americans have heard – and seen on videotape – Romney denigrate HispanicLatinos and dismiss at least 47 percent of the American people at a time when national unity is elementally important.  We do not know what he might think of undecided voters after last night.  The polls will soon enough begin to tell the latest version of the tale but no one knows what other images of the candidates – stripes or no stripes – the optical nerves of 70 million Americans sent to their brains.

Did they see a President in Barack Obama or did they see through the superficial arguments that Romney floats into the air hoping that the weight of truth does not crash them back to earth?  The debate and its results are important but there seems to be more going on with the innumerable polls that change storylines from day to day.  Polls of states are more reliable than national polls, and so what is happening in Arizona might be instructive.  Indeed, Arizona might be the most important state in the 2012 election.  And the polls after the debate in Arizona will probably conclude that the public has seen enough of the campaign.

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