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Boneyard for the Graybeards
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He moves across the lobby of Washington’s Metropolitan Club with the assurance of a man in his own environment. This is the habitat of party elders, Republican and Democratic. This is their comfort zone– safe, secure, orderly and predictable. This is where graybeards lunch, scheme and reminisce. It is as someone once called it: a hotbed of social rest.
Here on the well-worn Persian carpets, men and women of achievement in many fields, not the least politics, talk over unexceptional food, always with an eye for another grandee who deserves a wave across the dining room.
The man who just entered the lobby is a Republican through and through. He has done a lot for the party; has advised at the highest levels, since the Reagan presidency; and has been rewarded with a major ambassadorship. He will know a lot of people in the dining room on any day and even more will know him.
To dine at the Metropolitan Club is to step back to a time when eminent graybeards—yes, they were almost exclusively men and almost all lawyers–worked behind the scenes to help presidents and their parties. Names like Barbour, Clifford and Cutler come to mind.
Now lobbyists now whisper in influential ears, and the doyens of the Metropolitan Club are not in demand. Like the Georgetown dinner party, some things are now in the past.
There is no time for profound consideration, no time to weigh the data and no time to exercise institutional memory. Omar Khayyam’s moving finger writes very fast now; so to deal with new situations and crises, politicians fall back on old ideology. “Is it progressive?” ask Democrats. “What is the free-market solution?” ask Republicans.
Blame the warp-speed news cycle, and its overemphasis on politics over programs; the quick response over data and rumination. The relentless news machine wants speedy answers, everything in an instant.
A few blocks from the Metropolitan Club, the bloggers and twitterers in the White House press briefing room parse and comment upon the words of press secretary Robert Gibbs just as fast as he speaks. This is a de facto system where the trap is constantly sprung for the gaffe not the substance. If no gaffe is likely to occur, induce one.
Step forward Lynn Sweet of The Chicago Sun-Times with her race-heavy question about the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. This happened at the end of the last presidential press conference, when the chosen reporter usually goes for something light or fun. Not Ms. Sweet.
A few seconds at the end of that press conference eclipsed President Barack Obama’s earnest but dull defense of his health care reform proposals; eclipsed the previous 55 minutes. Obama was in a place he did not want to be, and he would stay there for weeks. No time to ask some party elder how best to handle the situation.
If Democratic grandees are sidelined in the new news-driven politics, then Republican statesmen, like the man at the Metropolitan, have been sent into exile. They can write an occasional op-ed and argue at think-tank seminars. But for now, the party has been hijacked by its broadcast wing. Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Mark Levin have become the censors of the party. They intimidate its elected officials and will brook nothing they hear from their own wise counselors.
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When a Lovely Flame Dies
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Farewell, tobacco. You’re a drug now and we don’t hang out with druggies. But, oh, before you fell, what history, what innocent bliss, what romance! They can’t take that away from us; even though President Obama has signed into law a bill which classifies tobacco as a drug, and the Food and Drug Administration will be landing its troops in Marlboro Country any day now, there are memories.
What memories!
Tobacco has killed in my family, so I should have no brief for it, but I do. Close friends have died, too; or they’re lung cancer survivors.
Yet it was tobacco that sustained the early settles of Virginia (which gave its name to the most popular variety of cigarette tobacco) and it remained an economic force until recent times.
In distant Zimbabwe, were I grew up, tobacco was king. Tobacco dwarfed corn as the cash crop of choice; and even city dwellers admired tobacco farmers, frequently known as “tobacco barons.”
At my school, the boys whose fathers grew tobacco were the plutocrats, Of course, they really weren’t that rich–it was just in relation to the rest of the population. They could do things that their relative wealth made possible; things like taking European vacations and buying new cars every few years.
There were, in those days, whispers about the health effects of smoking. The editor of the farming paper asked me to go out and find out if it was only American tobacco that was a problem and not the local crop. He was determined to be right, but no such luck.
Later, in the 1960s, I heard cigarette workers in Richmond, Va., proclaim that the famous Surgeon General’s report on smoking and health was a “communist plot.”
Tobacco favored light, sandy soils that were not ideal for citrus, corn, soy, or tea: the crops that sustained Zimbabwe’s economy until President Robert Mugabe destroyed the farming class, and farming productivity dwindled and ceased. I loved visiting tobacco farms. You would walk down the rows feeling the leaves, which left a slightly sticky residue on your hands. And I reveled in the heavy smell in the curing barns.
Later, living in England, I learned of the other pleasure of tobacco: the luxurious smokerama: glorious Cartier gold lighters, exquisite Tiffany silver cigarette boxes, elegant lacquered cigarette holders (could we have had Coward without them?), cigar cutters and humidors (Kennedy’s revenge against Castro), pipes of all kinds, from brier to Meerschaum to corn cob. Could MacArthur have prevailed without his modest corn cob pipe or Churchill triumphed without a mighty cigar?
There’s no more Sobranie Cocktail or Black Russian cigarettes in a girlfriend’s Christmas stocking, no Oval Turkish in Dad’s; and little brother who thought it was cool to upset people with a pack of Gaulois stuffed in his back pocket won’t be getting the satisfaction again.
Those great movies of the 1930s and 1940s depended on cigarettes as props. When the director called “action” someone was expected to light up. Now, only the villains light up. Some revisionists have suggested that old movies should be edited to remove the cigarettes so that children will not be tempted to take up the habit. But Bogart, Cagney, Cooper, Gable and Mitchum, to say nothing of Davis and Crawford, would be unsexy if film editors took away their oral satisfiers. Their characters would go up in smoke, so to speak.
Sadly, all bad things must come to an end. Remember that Venetian glass ashtray, that sophisticated cigarette holder, even that vintage Ronson lighter, well, they are all now drug paraphernalia. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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The Long Shadows of the British Empire
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Corruption in Kenya? Blame it on the British and the psychological damage of colonialism. The partition of Cyprus? Step forward the social engineers in London, who underestimated the depth of feeling in the Turkish minority when the British were finally forced out.
When it comes to the Middle East, one can really get exercised about “Perfidious Albion.” The British had their fingers in every territorial dispute: They created whole countries and, with the help of the French, imposed borders from Morocco to China.
Trouble with Iran? Even before the CIA started meddling there in 1953, it was Winston Churchill who, as First Sea Lord in 1913, decided the Royal Navy would move faster, cleaner and have greater range if it switched from coal to oil. So he partially nationalized the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, the forerunner of BP, to exploit the newly discovered oil fields in Iran. Later, this led to a surge in Iranian nationalism and the CIA plot to restore the Shah.
On to Pakistan and the British legacy in the autonomous tribal lands, now home to the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Put the British colonial administration of the 18th to 20th centuries in the dock. Yes, three centuries of British commission and omission.
The British interest in Afghanistan, which they failed to subdue in a series of wars, was largely as a buffer between British India and the growing territorial interests of the Russian Empire. It was here that The Great Game was played: the romanticized espionage that flourished in the region. The British divided the traditional Pashtun lands with the Durand Treaty of 1893, creating a northwestern border for British India, and later Pakistan. It amounted to a land grab. However, the British did recognize the separateness of the people in the Northwest Territories and left them to their tribal and religious ways.
With independence and the partition of India in 1947, the incoming Pakistani government had enough problems without encouraging ethnic strife between the largely Punjabi Pakistanis and their difficult Pashtun brothers in the territories. So the government in Islamabad continued the British policy of benign indifference to the Pashtuns, with whom they were more closely linked by religion than ethnicity or politics.
Yet, the border dispute smoldered and periodically erupted. Kabul and Islamabad do not agree, both blaming the border drawn by the British.
What neither the British nor the Pakistanis wanted was a strong movement for a Pashtun state that would carve out territory from Afghanistan, as well as the tribal territories in Pakistan. There was a failed attempt to bring this about in 1949. Segments of the Pakistani army and the intelligentsia have feared this ever since. They are haunted by another stateless people living on both sides of a border: the Kurds who straddle the border between Iraq, a largely British creation, and Turkey and Iraq and Iran.
The message is that simply being Muslim does not wipe out tribal and ethnic identity any more than borders drawn by others create a new identity. If it were so, Cyprus would not be divided; Yugoslavia would have held together, as would have Czechoslovakia; and Britain would not be considering the possibility of an independent Scotland–after 300 years of union.
The current hostilities in the Pakistani tribal areas, U.S. drone strikes on suspected Taliban strongholds and renewed determination from the Pakistani army to crush extremists in the region could renew a sense of nationhood among the Pashtuns, and a movement toward the creation of Pashtunistan across the British-drawn border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
In the long reaches of the night President Obama’s special envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, may wish one of the following had happened in the days of the British Raj: 1. the British had stayed home; 2. the British had insisted the Pashtuns submit to central authority; 3. the British had created a new country, Pashtunistan; or 4. the British had never created that troublesome border.
One way or the other, he can blame the Brits.
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First the Party, Now the Hangover
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By the time the Washington press corps struggled into the Washington Hilton for the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, we were pretty bedraggled.
So much news. There was the Obama puppy; the White House vegetable garden; Michelle’s arms; Barack’s chest, his hot dog, his mustard; and to cap it all, the knife-edge issue of whether Miss California would keep her crown. One suspects the Supreme Court was ready for an expedited hearing on that one.
So 2,600-plus journalists (most of who have never been near the White House) and guests, after many fights over tickets, struggled into the crowded confines of the Hilton to drink too much, fawn over actors and other celebrities, and talk on a leveled playing field with cabinet secretaries and service chiefs.
Make no mistake, this is the big one in Washington: the must-be-seen-at event.
This is Washington’s Oscar Night. Every year, many news organizations throw elaborate before and after parties. Organizations that value their dignity–like The Washington Post and The New York Times–or those, as so many are, that are in bankruptcy, do not throw parties. But ABC, Atlantic Media, Bloomberg, Business Week, CBS, CNN, Congressional Quarterly, Newsweek, Time and Reuters all vied to give the working press the works. The press drank deeply.
Of course, not all those enjoying the largesse of the publishers had tickets to the dinner. Many jumped into dinner suits or evening gowns (show lots of skin, darling) and enjoyed the cocktails and the celebrity-watching, before going home to see the show on television.
Actually, these crashers are smart and necessary. They fill the cocktail parties, so the hosts feel loved; they meet their friends, schmooze and scram before they make fools of themselves. They also are spared the pitched battle for tickets that precedes the dinner every year.
It is a battle between those with the big bucks and swagger, like the television networks, and those who actually write or broadcast about the White House. It is an unseemly struggle. The big outfits want as many as eight tables of 10, whereas many smaller outfits, like Human Events, do not pass the glamour test. Even Barron’s complains.
I used to fight to get one table. Now, I settle for four seats for my wife and myself and two friends. But every year, trade associations, lobbyists and journalists, who are not members of the White House Correspondents’ Association, implore me to get them in. I have started to affect hearing loss.
Year after year, the drill is the same. An inebriated audience listens to the president making jokes, usually at his own expense, then a comedian, chosen exclusively by the president of the association, tries to better the president and the effects of the liquor on the revelers.
Comedian Drew Carey, who can handle just about any audience, from Las Vegas to “The Price Is Right,” told me that the WHCA dinner was the one that had made him the most nervous of any standup engagement, and that he thought it was a difficult audience.
One year, Laura Bush stole the show when she spoofed her husband. In other years, George W. Bush stole the show with his self-mockery.
This year, Obama was funny but not uproarious.
Things were headed down the predictable slippery slope of after-dinner festivities when Wanda Sykes, the comedian known for her acerbic and sometimes blue humor, intimated that she would not shed a tear if Rush Limbaugh went to the great studio in the sky.
This did not cause supporters of Rush to walk out en masse. On Monday Fox News, which was well represented at the dinner and had Todd Palin as their prized guest, decided that a sacrilege had been committed against the sainted Rush. Led by Bill O’Reilly, Fox wanted an apology for the keeper of the conservative covenant. Their indignation was right up there with, you know, the Obama puppy, the White House vegetable garden, Michelle’s arms and Barack’s torso.
For those of us who are not in the small space to the right of Fox News, a vulgar comedian made an unfunny joke about a vulgar broadcaster. We should concentrate on the big stuff, like Miss California and her political philosophy.
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If We Get Our Way in Cuba, It Becomes Our Problem
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As President Barack Obama heads to Trinidad and Tobago to meet with leaders from the hemisphere, Cuba must be on his mind. He has slightly, very slightly, eased some of the conditions of the 47-year-old embargo on the island nation–less than many Americans wanted, and more than the hardest of the hardliners wanted.
His temerity is a testament to what a problem Cuba has now become for the United States. Once it was a political problem, involving the vote of Cuban-Americans in Miami. But as the generation that fled Fidel Castro’s revolution all those years ago has declined in numbers and influence, the epicenter of the Cuban problem has moved north from Miami to Washington.
Successive administrations have wrestled with what to do about Cuba; how to satisfy the angry refugees in Miami and to begin to normalize relations with our closest neighbor after Canada and Mexico. At one time, it was necessary to punish the communist regime for its willingness to be an outpost of the Soviet Union and a base for its missiles, and a fomenter of revolution in Africa and South America.
But things change, even in long-running dictatorships. No longer can Castro or his brother Raul, who has succeeded him in the day-to-day running of Cuba, look to Russia for succor, nor thrill to the applause of the unaligned nations.
The Brothers Castro–old, old men–have long since drawn in their international horns and have tacitly admitted the failure of their glorious revolution by tentatively loosening some of the economic reins (small private restaurants, foreign-currency accounts and cell phone ownership) that so enslaved Cubans. Last time I was in Cuba some party officials, over rum, told me that much of the old apparatus of the state–like the block informers—had become rusty.
Nowadays, Cubans seem a lot more concerned with the limits of their failed economy than the oppressive nature of the state. When I visited Cuba in the mid-1980s, the sense of the state was everywhere and was oppressive. You got the feeling that that if a group of people were walking down the street, they would all strive to be in the middle–not in front and not behind. In those days, the Russian presence was palpable and depressive.
As in the Soviet Union itself, government officials kept to the party line. Twenty years later, these same officials made jokes about the communist party and the governing apparatus. Particularly, I found them happy to ridicule the myth of Che Guevara, the mythological Argentine doctor who fought alongside Fidel Castro.
In short American attitudes to Cuba are changing as Cuban attitudes toward themselves are also changing. Theirs is not a yearning for political freedom as for personal mobility. Imagine growing up 90 miles from Miami, listening to commercial radio from Florida and knowing that if things do not change, your future will be one of poverty and confinement? Your face forever pressed against the American windowpane.
A government official, a member of the Communist Party, told me: “We are tired of rice and beans. We can smell the pork. We want some of it on our plates now.” A colleague of this man said that in the time of the Soviet Union, he would not have dared to speak up the way he did, but now it did not matter.
Obama has shown caution–as he does in many things–in edging towards a greater liberalism with Cuba. His challenge is geographic as well as political. If an open society emerges in Cuba, untold numbers of Cuba’s population of 11 million will try to emigrate to the United States. On Florida’s East Coast, thousands of boats are ready to illegally bring Cubans to the United States; likewise aircraft.
Cuba has no great wealth beyond its people; its biggest export is still sugar. Its people long for American goods, but they are penniless. U.S. agricultural exporters yearn to increase sales to Cuba, but the market is small.
There are already about 200,000 Americans who visit Cuba every year, according to the U.S. Interest Section in Havana (an embassy in all but name).
As the end of days for the Castro regime looms in Havana, a crisis grows in Washington: How will we keep the Cubans in Cuba if a new government meets all the well-published conditions for ending the embargo? A few Americans will head to Cuba. But mucho Cubans will be Miami-bound–like hundreds of thousands almost immediately. You cannot build a fence down the coast of Florida.
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The European Dilemma: Austerity or Growth
May 14th, 2012
Guests: Darren Gersh, PBS's "Nightly Business Report"; Laure Mandeville, Le Figaro; Michael Fauntroy, George Mason University
Radio’s impact in Washington and the nation
May 7th, 2012
Guests: Tim Farley, Host and Program Director, Sirius XM Radio’s POTUS Channel 124
Elections here and abroad; crises in Syria and Sudan
April 30th, 2012
Guests: Arnaud de Borchgrave, CSIS; Ed O'Keefe, The Washington Post; and Christopher Chambers, Georgetown University
Word and phrase origins in the U.S. presidency
April 23rd, 2012
Guests: Paul Dickson, author; Carl Cannon, RealClearPolitics.com
Political “wars” in the 2012 election, and real wars elsewhere
April 16th, 2012
Guests: Michael Fauntroy, George Mason University; Ed Kelley, The Washington Times; Chuck Lewis, Hearst Newspapers