The man was a sponge. Creating and editing New York Magazine, he soaked up the zeitgeist of the late 1960s and 1970s and gave it back to readers as a heady brew of New Journalism and cultural chic. Clay Felker, who died today at 82, was one of a kind.

Between jobs as a magazine editor, I wrote for him and witnessed the workings of his restless mind and insatiable curiosity. Visits to his office were a montage of people popping up at an open door with gossip, news and rumors and his prowls through the corridors, asking everyone who passed, “What’s new? What’s new?”

Magazine editors are unique among journalists in that they invent their readers. Rather than covering news over which they have no control, they fill their pages with whatever interests or obsesses them and, like magnets, draw the attention of those who find the results to their taste. Felker’s contemporary, Harold Hayes of Esquire, called it delivering an attitude toward the world on a regular basis.

Between them, they gave birth to the New Journalism, which mirrored a new kind of politics with a new kind of reporting. In New York, Tom Wolfe wrote about Radical Chic and Gloria Steinem profiled the man who was moving into the White House in 1968 (”When Richard Nixon is alone in a room, is there anyone there?”)

Almost single-handedly, Felker made journalism a subject of popular interest. Wolfe satirized the New Yorker, and everybody reported on the New York Times. Even I got into the act with a piece titled “The New York Times Discovers Sex” while writing about literary auctions (”What Am I Bid for Lyndon Johnson?”). Ralph Ginzburg going to jail for what he published (”The Punishment for Bad Taste Is Three Years”) and the melodrama surrounding the death of the Saturday Review.

Writers became celebrities, and Felker nurtured their fame but stayed out of the spotlight himself. After he lost New York to Rupert Murdoch in 1977, he moved to California and tried to duplicate his success there, but LA was too shallow for his kind of in-depth reporting and he turned to teaching journalism.

I would see him for lunch out there every so often, and he was still asking, “What’s new? What’s new?”

Cross-posted from my blog.

Most people observing the American presidential election of 2008 regard health care, Iraq and perhaps immigration as the major issues of the campaign. But Juan Gabriel Vasquez, a columnist for El Espectador of Colombia, believes that there’s one issue that overshadows all the rest.

Vasquez writes in part:

“Among the things of most concern to citizens, according to the polls, are the war in Iraq, education and public health. But it’s possible that the real challenge for Obama or McCain will have nothing to do with these. Rather, they’ll have to address an item that is directly responsible for the problems in public health, education, and Iraq: religion.”

And how did it all get this way. Vasquez continues:

“Never in the history of the United States has religion had such a definitive presence in the decision-making of government. North American believers like to think that their country was founded on religious principles (God is mentioned in many parts of the nation’s lore, from bank notes to the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag), but the truth is that not even the most notoriously evangelical presidents, from Lyndon Johnson to Ronald Reagan, have ever permitted the design of national policy on the basis of religious arguments. The Bush White House, however, is the closest things possible to a church.”

Read the rest of this entry »

The question of whether the Democrats are shooting themselves in the foot with the race issue is being hotly debated on both sides of the Atlantic.

Antoine Maurice writes for Switzerland’s Tribune De Geneve:

“Why is it such a struggle for Obama to get elected? The question of Blacks in the United States is the best kept secret in the American family. Forty years after President Johnson’s great campaign for civil rights, much about race relations has changed, but not the essence: the semi-condescending, semi-frightened, mostly disguised fear of African Americans by the White majority.”

In summing up what’s at stake in the Democratic primary race, Maurice writes:

“The outbreak of race in the debate lends itself to a rational argument about the fragility of the Black candidate. In the mind, these unspeakable racial divisions secretly lurk, and mark the campaign with a strong emotional impact. The debate constitutes a profound test for both Democratic candidates.”

By Antoine Maurice

Translated By Sandrine Ageorges

May 3, 2008

Tribune de Geneve - Switzerland - Original Article (French)

Why is it such a struggle for Obama to get elected? The question of Blacks in the United States is the best kept secret in the American family. Forty years after President Johnson’s great campaign for civil rights, much about race relations has changed, but not the essence: the semi-condescending, semi-frightened, mostly disguised fear of African Americans by the White majority.

The Black community has been shaped largely by a series of dramatic episodes, and it will soon commemorate the 50th anniversary of some of these events: The death of Martin Luther King, last great advocate for Black integration [40 years ago]; the assassination of two Kennedys [John and Robert - 40 years ago], the dawn of the campaign for civil rights, the birth of a Black middle class, the growth of inter-racial marriage, the advent of minority studies (Black history) in academia and minority participation in the arts.

In short, African Americans, who have built their unity based mostly on the way others view them, have experienced unprecedented economic and civic progress.

Barack Obama serves as an indicator of this spectacular progress, while at the same time he is confronting - despite himself - its incompleteness. His strategy thus far has been not to play the race card, but to present himself as the promoter of change in America, more committed to redressing income inequalities than the burden of racial inequity.

READ ON AT WORLDMEETS.US, along with continuing translated foreign press coverage of the U.S. elections.

I wrote here last night about my perception that John McCain’s campaign as the presidential nominee of the Republican party was starting off on the wrong foot.

Emblematic of that to me was McCain’s decision to tear to Washington to receive a personal endorsement from George W. Bush today.

Mind you, I would expect nothing other than the sitting Republican president to Read the rest of this entry »

This week’s debate pushed front and center the question of whether the Democratic Party can do what it did in 1960, nominate an inspiring young leader paired with a Washington veteran in the workings of government.

John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson persuaded voters that they could open a New Frontier with the first Catholic president in American history. This year, the Democrats can offer a ticket with two firsts. (More about that here.)

In tone and substance, the debate in Austin suggested that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton together can restore the damage that George W. Bush has done to the American body politic and that John McCain might only prolong.

Their policy differences were invisible to the naked eye, and they ended up with the kind of hearty handshake that could be repeated to seal their designation as the 2008 ticket at the Democratic convention in August.

For Obama, it would be a demonstration of his claim that he can bring people together. On her part, it would take character for Hillary Clinton to accept the vice-presidency after leading in the presidential polls for more than a year.

But voters are rendering a different judgment now, and when the Texas and Ohio primaries are over, Obama should look back at how JFK in 1960 insured that his party ended eight years of Republican rule by teaming up with his opponent for the nomination.

If the ticket won, Hillary Clinton in 2016 would still be younger than John McCain is now.

Cross-posted from my blog.

Having been eligible for the draft and an all-expenses-paid trip to Vietnam since I was 18, 1968 was the year that I turned 21 and finally was old enough to drink and vote, which I did in that order and with great enthusiasm.

I had a front-row seat for this year of great change — including antiwar protests, the King and Kennedy assassinations, and the coming of age of the civil rights and women’s movements — but nowhere were those changes manifested so powerfully than in the presidential race that year.

This presidential election year also is shaping up to be one of potentially great change, which begs the question:

Were the changes of 1968 more important than the changes of 2008 could be?

That is a difficult question because America and the world have changed (there’s that word again) in myriad ways over the last four decades, so for the purpose of trying to tease out an answer, I’ll reframe the question thusly:

Were Americans individually and the nation generally better off in 1968 than in 2008?

Thus framed, the answer to that question is a big fat “yes,” and so the answer to my initial question is that the changes of 2008 — at the very least the much anticipated end of the Age of Bush — may indeed be more important.

Since we’re looking at year versus year through the prism of presidential politics, it should be noted that there is an obvious similarity and two obvious differences.

The similarity is the looming presence of costly and unpopular wars in both 1968 and 2008.

The first difference is that unlike 1968, the U.S. today is the sole superpower, has an unprecedented global reach and is the subject of profound loathing abroad, notably among the people whose most radical elements can do the American homeland harm.

The second difference is that in 1968 most of the opposition President Johnson faced was from within his own party over his stewardship of the Vietnam War, which prompted him to opt out of running for reelection, while in 2008 President Bush has gotten a free pass from most of his prospective heirs apparent, who dutifully worship at his altar although he is extraordinarily unpopular and is the chief reason the Republican hegemony in Washington is coming to such an unceremonious end.

Read the rest of this entry »

This article in the German publication Die Welt (The World), and cited in an interesting post by Robin Koerner, says that Europeans are getting a hazy picture of Barack Obama’s views on foreign policy and national security issues.

I think that it also precisely identifies Obama’s area of greatest vulnerability with US voters once the fall campaign begins. (Should Obama be the Democratic nominee for president, which appears likely.)

But in fairness to him, with rare exceptions, few new presidents come to the White House with significant diplomatic or national security experience or with strategic visions born of such experience. George W. Bush certainly had no such vision. His father, who had served brief stints as US envoy to China, US ambassador to the United Nations, and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency had something of a foreign policy vision, inherited from every post-World War Two president, from Truman to Reagan. But even the elder Bush was shy on “the vision thing,” as he called it.

The last US president to possess a combination of experience and strategic vision in the realms of foreign policy and national security, and both were abundantly present in him, was Dwight Eisenhower. His possession of these assets paid off hugely as, at the height of the Cold War, Eisenhower expertly extricated the US from the Korean War (within six months of his taking the oath of office) and kept the nation at peace through the balance of his term. Eisenhower did this largely without grand pronouncements. Too often his successors in the Oval Office have thought that speeches equaled policy. As an old national security pro, Ike knew better.

Before Eisenhower, whose first term began in January, 1953, the last president to have anything like a strategic vision was Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909). In spite of his bombast and a militarism which resulted in violating other nations’ sovereignty to, as TR himself bragged, “take” Panama, his basic approach to foreign affairs was similar to the one Ike consistently pursued and Roosevelt himself memorably summarized: Speak softly and carry a big stick.

This approach is what later generations would call “foreign policy realism,” an approach that asked three basic questions: Read the rest of this entry »

The results of the Iowa caucuses, coming on January 3, will likely tell different stories in the presidential nominating races of the Republican and Democratic parties.

That shouldn’t be surprising. For months now, the campaigns for the two parties’ nominations have unfolded like tales from parallel universes. The datelines and the timelines are the same, but the plotlines are altogether different.

Democratic voters are generally happy with their field of presidential contenders.

The Republicans have been restive. For months, people hankered for former Tennessee senator Fred Thompson to enter the race, for example. But once he did–”belatedly” according to the current bizarre standards, he was met by a collective yawn.

The respective parties’ debates have found Democratic and Republican candidates spending time talking about different topics, almost as though they were speaking to two different countries. Democrats talk more about health care and Republicans focus more on illegal immigration.

But it’s the difference in politics in the two parties that most interests me right now. The stakes associated with the Iowa caucuses and then, the New Hampshire primary, which happens on January 8, are very different for Democrats and Republicans.

At present, it appears that former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee will win the Iowa caucuses in the Republican Party. That will afford the affable former clergyman a bit of a bounce in his bid for his party’s nomination.

But it would be a mistake to conclude that Huckabee will automatically become the presumptive Republican nominee if he wins in Iowa. Such cautions are especially appropriate in the Republican universe.

In 1980, for example, George H.W. Bush narrowly won in Iowa, taking 32% of the vote. The elder Bush pronounced that he had Big Mo–momentum–in his corner as he headed to New Hampshire. Because the Bush family had strong New England roots, many presumed it would be a likely spot for a Bush to win, thrusting him toward the GOP presidential nomination. But it didn’t happen. Big Mo shifted his allegiance and Ronald Reagan was nominated for the presidency.

There’s another reason an Iowa win might not give Huckabee a big boost from Big Mo. Iowa’s Republican caucus-goers are both more conservative and more evangelical than voters in New Hampshire’s primary. The composition of Iowa’s Republican caucus-goers is advantageous to Huckabee. The composition of New Hampshire’s likely primary-voters is not. Not only New Hampshire’ Republican voters more moderate and dramatically less evangelical, the state also allows independents to cast votes in the parties’ primaries.

While Huckabee can certainly capitalize on an Iowa win, it’s likely that such a victory will say less about enthusiasm for him, at least for the moment, than about a decided lack of enthusiasm for the presumptive frontrunners going into Iowa, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani.

A Huckabee win in Iowa then, will be a signal that the race for the GOP nomination is far from over. For Republicans, that will heighten New Hampshire’s importance.

For some time, it’s been clear that two members of the Republican field have built-in advantages for the New Hampshire primary race. One is Arizona’s senator, John McCain, a maverick whose appeal among Granite State voters was strong enough to give him a win there in 2000.

But the Republican with overwhelming apparent advantages in New Hampshire was Romney. For any Massachusetts pol, campaigning in New Hampshire has always been like the Red Sox playing at Fenway Park. On the Democratic side, John Kennedy, Michael Dukakis, Paul Tsongas, and John Kerry all knew that they could count on New Hampshire to give their quests for the presidency boosts. In 1964, while he served as ambassador to South Vietnam for a Democratic president, former Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Richard Nixon’s 1960 vice presidential running mate, won the New Hampshire presidential primary.

Given his advantages, the New Hampshire primary has always been a must-win for Romney. The stakes in the Granite State will only get bigger if he loses in Iowa. Failure to win in New Hampshire will spell the end of his quest for the nomination.

Romney operatives must be feeling that they’re watching a train wreck, as their candidate, prone to gaffes and exaggerations, loses support in both Iowa and New Hampshire, watches Huckabee surpass him in the first state, and sees McCain revivify his New Hampshire constituency, all at Romney’s expense.

If Iowa and New Hampshire produce two different winners and the elimination of Romney from the field, as I expect they will, the winner of the Republican nomination will be unknown through at least the South Carolina primary on January 26. Front-loading be hanged, the Republicans will have a race on their hands.

But in that parallel universe, the race for the Democratic nomination, a very different tale is likely to be told. In recent weeks, Illinois’ senator Barack Obama, has been pulling even with or surpassing New York’s senator, Hillary Clinton, not only in Iowa, but now in New Hampshire. If Obama wins in Iowa, as I expect that he will, the Democratic race, unlike the one among Republicans, will be effectively over. Barack Obama will then be the Democratic nominee.

The reason is simple. In 2004, the Democrats had a large field that included John Edwards, Wesley Clark, Joe Lieberman, Howard Dean, and John Kerry. When Kerry defied conventional wisdom and won in Iowa, Democratic voters became like traditional ward-heeling politicians, swallowing whatever misgivings they may have had about Kerry to back him. True-believing liberals forgot their loyalty to Dean and got on board with the Massachusetts senator. Democrats, many believing that the Bush Republicans had stolen the 2000 presidential election, were desperate to win. Dems decided to unite behind Kerry.

It almost worked. John Kerry got more votes than any Democratic presidential nominee in history. More than Franklin Roosevelt. More than Lyndon Johnson. Certainly more than Bill Clinton, who only mustered plurality votes in two successive elections. The problem is that George W. Bush got more votes, popular and electoral.

In the intervening years, the Democrats have built up even more desperation to put a Democrat in the White House. If the polls are to believed, quite a lot of independents and not a few Republicans agree with them. Democratic candidates are receiving more contributions from more contributors than their Republican counterparts. Crowds for Democratic candidates are larger and seemingly more enthusiastic than those for Republican candidates. Democratic rank-and-file voters, as much as the party’s professionals, want to win in 2008.

If Obama defies the odds and stands down the formidable Clinton machine in Iowa, the trend toward the Illinois senator, in New Hampshire and elsewhere, will become a tidal wave.

Two parallel universes. Two differing scenarios. The result? The presidential nomination of the party which generally gives its nod to the candidate next in line up for grabs. The party which pioneered democratization in its nominating process to give more candidates a shot closing ranks to support one person ten months before the general election.

But, as I always say when making political prognostications: Or not.

The analogizing between the wars in Vietnam and Iraq commenced as the glow from the speedy take-down of Saddam Hussein wore off and it became obvious that not only would U.S. troops not be home by Christmas 2003 but the Bush administration was ill-prepared for a long haul that had the earmarks of becoming a Vietnam-like quagmire.

As I wrote here, there are apt comparisons between all wars. People are killed. People are taken prisoner. There are winners. There are losers. And sooner or later, Hollywood gets into the act and profits from the bloodshed. But the accurate analogies between Vietnam and Iraq are relatively few.

Now come scholar-historians Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson, who in a compelling Democracy: A Journal of Ideas commentary not only put the lie to much of the endless Vietnam-Iraq analogizing by the White House and senior U.S. military commanders, but argue that the biggest lesson of the earlier war is that the U.S. has to get out of the present one now.

Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House.

During his first term, George W. Bush was arguably the most successful party-building president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Like FDR, who fashioned a Democratic coalition that dominated American politics for a generation, Bush during his first four years in office helped the Republicans post gains in Congress and around the country that many in the party viewed as the cornerstone for a similarly long-lived GOP majority.

But during his seemingly ill-starred second term, the Republicans have hemorrhaged seats up and down the ballot–losing their majorities in both houses of Congress, dropping hundreds of seats in the state legislatures, and giving up enough governorships to leave the GOP with less than half of them for the first time in more than a decade.

As a result, with barely a year to go in his administration, that part of Bush’s legacy–as a party builder par excellence–remains very much in question.

Over the course of his presidency, Bush has thrown himself into the role of party builder with gusto that few, if any, of his predecessors have matched. He has helped the GOP and its candidates raise tens of millions of dollars and he has stumped extensively for Republican candidates who tapped the White House for assistance.

Boosted by high approval ratings through much of his first term and with the Democrats on the defensive, Bush’s efforts to help his party initially paid off. In 2002, he became the first president since FDR in 1934 to see his party gain both House and Senate seats in his first midterm election.

In 2004, Republicans added more seats to their congressional majorities with Bush leading the GOP ticket. The Republican Senate total swelled to 55 seats and the GOP House total to 232, the highest post-election total for the party on the House side in nearly 60 years and equaling the GOP’s highest post-election total on the Senate side since the eve of the Great Depression in the late 1920s. A nation split 50-50 after the 2000 election looked after 2004 as though it was definitely leaning Republican.

MORE

Is former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, onetime collegiate wrestling champion, fitness freak and an all-around tough guy who preferred to stand at his Pentagon desk rather than sit, losing his stuff?

According to a gossipy report in the WaPo, the people accompanying the 75-year-old Rumsfeld when he lunched last week at Morton’s in Washington had to help him onto an escalator, held his elbow and opened doors for him.

A Republican tipster told the WaPo that “he looked old,” although that was not my impression when I watched him lie and obfuscate his way through a House subcommittee hearing on the Pat Tillman cover-up a mere two weeks ago.

Now as someone 15 years Rummy’s junior who has his own share of aches and pains, I have a certain amount of empathy for him. After all, he was in the engine room for the first three years of the Iraq war and his name is writ large on the worst foreign policy blunder in U.S. history. I can only imagine that the stress he was under might finally have caught up with and literally crippled him.

But what I really want to know – but do not expect to find out anytime soon – is whether Rumsfeld has had or at some future time will have what I call a McNamara Moment.

Robert McNamara, for you youngins out there, was secretary of defense during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and was in the engine room for the early years of the Vietnam War, which didn’t turn out too swell, either.

Like Rumsfeld, McNamara was a control freak who thought he had all the answers, surrounded himself with sycophantic acolytes, did not take kindly to dissenting generals, was a technocrat who worshipfully embraced sophisticated weaponry, projected an unshakable faith that he was doing the right thing, communicated poorly in public forums . . . and turned out to know jack about how to run a war.

And like Rumsfeld, was forced out or quit depending upon whom you talk to.

McNamara left the Pentagon in 1968 at the height of the Vietnam War to run the World Bank for a decade or so and had been absent from the world stage for several years when he wrote In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, a reflection on his years running the war that was published in 1995.

This was followed by media appearances and speaking tours amidst an extraordinary outpouring of animus from a lot of people with a lot of pent up hostility over the war, including Yours Truly, and more or less culminated in The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. This Academy Award-winning 2003 Errol Morris documentary largely consists of interviews with the man himself.

McNamara has never explained the circumstances of his catharsis, that point at which he realized his manifold failures as defense secretary and the immense suffering, death and deprivation that he and LBJ were responsible for. One can only assume that it did not come to him in the middle of the night a la Ebenezer Scrooge and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come, but rather in a drawn out metamorphosis befitting a man of his intellect and analytical skills.

McNamara never actually apologized for his role in the Vietnam debacle, but clearly was haunted by it, and his mantra became “We were wrong, terribly wrong.”

Rumsfeld also has not apologized and it is difficult forseeing that he will ever do so, but is he too haunted by Iraq?

Again, I wish the man no ill and have not a shred of schadenfreude now that it appears his health may be failing. Rumsfeld is intensely proud and very private, so I do not know if he weeps bitter tears when he reads that yet another man or woman he was responsible for sending into battle without enough support, let alone the proper equipment, is pulverized by an IED, shot dead by an insurgent sniper or snaps under stress and is brought home in a straightjacket.

Nearly 16,000 Americans had been killed in Viet Nam when McNamara left; by the time the United States finally withdrew in 1975, the number stood at over 58,000. Nearly 3,000 Americans had been killed in Iraq when Rumsfeld left; the number now stands at nearly 3,700.

And continues to grow and grow.

Remembering Lady Bird Johnson: you can read a remarkable remembrance about a remarkable woman from a TMV coblogger who personally knew her and her husband Lyndon Johnson right HERE.