Thursday, January 28, 2010

Posted For Posterity's Sake


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Democrats fall as fast as Nixon Republicans in 1974

By: Michael Barone
Senior Political Analyst
January 27, 2010

(AP photo)

Republican Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts' special Senate election was for Democratic leaders a moment that can be described in two words, of which I will only print the first here, which is "oh."

Left-wing bloggers, liberal columnists and the stray Nobel Prize winner-turned polemicist are all urging Democrats in Congress to pass, somehow, some way, a health care bill, and many of them are calling for a second and even larger stimulus bill.

But Democrats in Congress are replying, as politicians are wont to do when challenged by party wingers, that their name is on the ballot. New York Times editorialists can opine that the Massachusetts result had nothing to do with opposition to health care, but their life's work is not in peril.

Democratic officeholders know theirs is. Some are heading for the hills. Four well-regarded veteran congressmen announced their surprise retirements in December; two longtime Democratic senators folded in January. Family concerns have suddenly become very pressing.

Others are holding out against the bloggers. Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that "unease would be the gentlest word" to describe House Democrats' refusal to pass the Senate health care bill. Her elegant ears must have burned in that caucus meeting.

Sens. Evan Bayh and Blanche Lincoln, up for re-election in Indiana and Arkansas and facing by far the most negative poll numbers in their long political careers, let it be known that there was no way they would support the reconciliation process, requiring only 51 votes, to jam through a health care bill.

But more than health care legislation is in trouble. I have not seen a party's fortunes collapse so suddenly since Richard Nixon got caught up in the Watergate scandal and a president who carried 49 states was threatened with impeachment and removal from office.

The victory of a Democrat in the special election to fill Vice President Gerald Ford's House seat in February 1974 was a clear indication that the bottom had fallen out for the Republican Party. Brown's victory last week looks as if something similar has happened to the Democratic Party.

Many people ask me whether the Democrats are in as much trouble as they were in 1994. The numbers suggest they are in much deeper trouble, at least at this moment. Back in 1994 I wrote the first article in a nonpartisan publication suggesting that the Republicans had a serious chance to win the 40 seats necessary for a majority in the House. That article appeared in U.S. News & World Report in July 1994.

This year political handicapper Charlie Cook is writing in January, six months earlier in the cycle, that Republicans once again would capture the 40 seats they need for a majority if the House elections were held today. I concur. The generic vote question -- which party's candidates would you vote for in House elections -- is at least as favorable to Republicans as it was in the last month before the election in 1994.

Nothing is entirely static in politics, and opinions could change. Barack Obama could shift to the center, as Bill Clinton did after his party's thumping in 1994; the economy could visibly recover and start producing new jobs; a crisis like 9/11 and a good presidential response could boost the president and his party as 9/11 boosted George W. Bush and his party in 2001 and 2002.

But I sense that something more fundamental is at stake. Obama in his first year adopted the priorities of what pundit Joel Kotkin, a Democrat himself, calls the "gentry liberals." Obama called for addressing long-term issues like health care and supposed climate change. He and his economic advisers, like many analysts across the political spectrum, underestimated the rise in unemployment. Talk about "green jobs" has proved to be just talk.

Obama's conciliatory foreign policy and his attempts to mollify terrorists have produced no perceptible positive responses and run against the grain of most American voters. Questioning the Christmas bomber for just 50 minutes and then reading him his Miranda rights has left Obama open to charges that his policies fail to protect the American people.

The cacophony of conflicting advice from left-wing bloggers, pundits and elected officials is a sign of a party in disarray, its central premises undermined by events. Massachusetts may have been a wake-up call enabling the Democrats to recover. But right now they're tossing and turning.

Michael Barone, The Examiner's senior political analyst, can be contacted at mbarone@washingtonexaminer.com. His columns appear Wednesday and Sunday, and his stories and blog posts appear on ExaminerPolitics.com.

Sunday, January 24, 2010

Echoes Of A Life Long Gone

The only known film of Anne Frank. Haunting.

On Popularity

"Popularity is a crime from the moment it is sought; it is only virtue when men have it whether they will to or no."-George Savile, 1st Marquis of Halifax, 1633-1695

Monday, January 11, 2010

The Loss Of Album Artwork

I caught the last gasp of the "Long Playing" (LP) album, with requisite fancy album cover, whilst coming of age in the late 70's-early 80's. It was quite an experience to buy music in those days. If you were lucky enough to be into a band that could put some bread into the artwork, the whole experience of listening to the music could be enhanced tremendously by the visuals. Yes/Crimson/Earthworks (among others) drummer Bill Bruford once opined that the album was your "mission statement"; indeed he was right. You could get a pretty good feel of the type of band you were about to listen to when you bought the album by the artwork employed by the band in question. Amongst my faves were Emerson, Lake & Palmer's Brain Salad Surgery, with its metallic presentation that represented the aggressive sophistication of the aforementioned recording quite well. A smart band with some artistic license could post a visual to its cover that could be tremendously arresting. A couple of additional cases in point: King Crimson In the Court of the Crimson King, Yes Fragile and Close to the Edge, Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon, Rolling Stones Sticky Fingers (complete with real zipper), Jethro Tull Stand Up (which actually had pop-up characters when opening the gatefold), and of course, Sgt. Pepper's.

Great stuff, it was. Sadly, with the advent of the compact disc (CD), the artwork was shrunk to one quarter of the size of the LP's canvass. I never did get the same buzz from buying a CD as I did from opening up an LP for the first time. (Rarely did I buy cassette tape either, unless it was specifically to play on a boom box or play on a Sony Walkman.) Reading the liner notes, the lyrics, and peering at the artwork contributed tremendously to the experience. Even though too much care went into not scratching the LP, and inevitably one always did with repeated play, it was a rich experience that has been lost to the ages. Now, in the age of MP3s, one needn't even buy a CD, and so the artwork has become utterly disposable. A shame really, but then it is extraordinarily convenient to have the equivalent of twenty-four days worth of music at my disposal at the click of a keyboard. If an LP has approximately forty minutes of playing time, that equals 1.25 albums per hour in a 24 hour period, and I have 24 days worth of music (according to my iTunes indicator), I would have 720 LPs in my apartment. Sheesh.

Technological progress, for the most part, is a good thing. But there's always that is lost with the onset of said technology. I won't miss the cassette or the CD, but the loss of the album artwork made available by the LP is slightly bittersweet for me. However, I'm sure this won't be a lost piece of LP artwork, except to make fun of.

Invictus-By William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of fate
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years finds
And shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.