CAN'T STOP 'TIL I GET ENOUGH...

'Ya know, I used to worry that if I started a blog, I wouldn't have the discipline to keep it up.  Now, I don't seem to have the discipline to stop!  I believe that in the last week or so alone, I've become or am becoming what one Internet friend aptly describes as a "blogging fool."  Today, my attention is delightfully split between the entertainment and political worlds, and in both, I wish to take this opportunity to give credit where it is due. Unfortunately, it seems like I'll have to split it up into two blogs, but... that's okay.  In the words of Leslie Gore, "It's my party, I can do what I want to."  Do what I want to, do what I want to...

Finishing up what I essentially started with the last two blogs, I'm going begin in the political world... with none other than President Barack Obama, himself!  Yes, I'm actually going to give him credit for something GOOD, although it has mixed feelings behind it because of certain underlying things I think it might represent.  The relevant news story can be found here: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/obama-ads-sometimes-overboard-162733921--election.html.  In what is, for some reason, an unaired segment of a 60 Minutes interview, Obama admits to the "extremes" of some of his campaign ads' attacks on rival Mitt Romney.  Of course, he goes on to defend them as being par for the course in politics - which I grudgingly have to concede - and insists that the facts are still important to him.  Unfortunately, I wonder whether or not the facts are as important to the voters, themselves, if for no other reason than that they tend to inherently distrust anything and everything that isn't telling them what they want to hear about their party and candidates' of choice.

In a way, I'm confused about my own feelings here.  On the one hand, I'm obliged to acknowledge the necessity behind those contrasts.  I value the choice we have as American voters and that choice would mean much less without that contrast.  It is, in my opinion, one of the tragedies of the extreme partisanship that we're seeing right now on both sides that those with unwavering confidence in their own party and its policies act as if their side and only their side should ever win an election - period.  To me, that's not only naive, but dangerous.  After all, America was always a great experiment, and part of what has made that experiment great has been the incorporation of its diversity into its system of government, particularly the diversity of ideas and paths represented in American politics.  Even as a Republican, I was delighted when the Democratic candidate won my city's (Jacksonville, Florida's) recent mayoral election because despite my general high regard for the underlying ideals of conservatism, I knew that the previous Republican mayors had left the city in a precarious state and what little I knew of the new mayor's plans just felt like the right things to do under the circumstances.

Having said all that, I believe the reason that President Obama is saying this in an almost confessional tone is that this "sharp contrast" might also be a symptom of the very extremism that I just mentioned. From what I can tell, the extremism of the voters seems to be pushing the politicians to their own extremes, making it particularly more difficult for them to expand their bases. This is arguably because there do seem to be fewer and fewer truly "independent" and "undecided" voters in America from one election to the next.  For example, while I can't recall where, I saw a panel of allegedly independent and undecided voters interviewed on television recently and, from what I could tell, even though they left their ultimate decision open to change, they all seemed to lean in decidedly clear directions - either the left (Democrat) or the right (Republican).  It came across in their tone when talking about one candidate versus the other and in the way in which some were more concerned about some issues than others. 

Tonight, this reminded me of a President and his famous Treasury Secretary that took particular heat for their policies on the eve of the Great Depression.  I looked it up and it was actually three presidents under which famous banker Andrew Mellon served in that post - Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge and the notorious Herbert Hoover.  The policies of Mellon were summed up in a statement that reminds me a lot of the embattled policies of former President Bush's Administration, of current candidate Romney and the Republican Party, in general.  He wrote:

The history of taxation shows that taxes which are inherently excessive are not paid. The high rates inevitably put pressure upon the taxpayer to withdraw his capital from productive business.

His goal, apparently, was to cut spending and repay the debts incurred during World War 1.  As a noted philanthropist, himself, he seems to have gambled that the wealthiest of Americans would be so gratified by lower tax rates (which Mellon seems to have felt they deserved, anyway) that they would willingly pay more - if not in taxes then to create businesses and jobs and engage in generally philanthropic activities. Ultimately, he achieved his goal of lower taxes and did reduce the deficit. Unfortunately, Mellon was an older man with somewhat old-fashioned perspectives when he took the post.  He had been also been wealthy for some time and, in the end, was either unaware or unconcerned about the sort of recklessness with which the rich were making risky investments and consciously manipulating the price of stocks to suit their own ends, treating the relatively new Stock Market, in particular, like just another game.  Of course, by the time the roaring 20's were underway, they'd convinced the middle and lower classes to play the game, too, but because they probably didn't earn as much and definitely lacked the financial savvy and the inside knowledge of the wealthier investors, they wound up paying most of the consequences for what, at that time, anyway, were the wealthier investors' mistakes. 

In the end, Mellon probably had a good idea, but at the wrong time - or, at least, a good idea that wound up turning bad because it didn't take into account human fallacy and recklessness.  It's a story that eerily echoes some of those ad's of the Obama campaign that also make the "sharp contrasts" in that they do paint Mitt Romney - born into a family of public service, I think, and fairly successful from an early age - as another Mellon, but potentially worse in that he could potentially be THE PRESIDENT... where the buck stops, as I think Jimmy Carter put it.  Of course, if there were any real cooperation in Washington, as there seems to have been in decades past when the biggest complaint was about gridlock and how slow the government was, we would have calculated compromises and a much better blending of both policies. 

In conclusion, I applaud Obama for his admission - even if it might, on the surface, represent a sort of apologetic weakness for which more fervent liberals seem to have recently come to criticize him.  This should, whether it does or not, be an eye-opener to voters that teaches them the difference between the forms that policies take on the campaign trail versus the form they must inevitably taken when they need to be implemented in the real world, with real world considerations at stake.  While I'm no expert, I think that the loopholes should be closed and that taxes on the wealthy should be raised - TEMPORARILY, though, and not just because they happen to represent percentages higher than those paid by the average "secretary."  In the short-run, at least, we need the revenue, and the behavior of the private sector since, say, the mid-90's, at least - from Wall Street to Main Street - suggests that bets need to be hedged and that perhaps, for the moment, the government needs to be the responsible one when it comes to the nation's money if the private sector won't. I'm not sure Romney sees this, and if he does, I'm not sure he cares because, again, he doesn't seem to have that personal stake in things that might have helped Mellon avoid his alleged mistakes. The balance, however, also comes in the fact that the government also needs to learn a few lessons in responsible money management.  Solyndra, though minor in the grand scheme of things, does not look good on the Obama record, nor does the ease with which people seem to have recently defrauded the government out of emergency aid money that, I think, was supposed to go to flood victims in the mid-South last year or the year before.  Politically, the left needs to show a little bit more respect for the necessity of small businesses in our economy, for their owners and operators and for the hard work that they DID put into CREATING such businesses. Whether they like it or not, this is still a free market and an economy that is designed to be driven, first and foremost, by private sector needs and decisions.  Obama's remark that you didn't create this was and remains so controversial, I think, because the government aid to which it likely refers arguably comes from the taxes paid by people like those that own and operate businesses large and small. Even if most of that revenue comes from tariffs and little, miscellaneous fees and such applied to larger, global trade, in America, it still involves and relies upon the innovation and productivity of private sector businesses and businesspeople.

(NEXT BLOG: Say bye-bye to politics!  For now... As The Dark Knight Rises for what is probably the last few times on big cinema and Imax screens before the saga's final entry bows on DVD and Blu-Ray this winter, many are basking in what they believe will be Christopher Nolan and crew's shining and hard-to-beat legacy, not only in the world of Batman movies but in that of modern superhero movies, in general.  Still, I'm compelled to remind everyone that will listen of another trailblazer, one still active in the industry, but whose own Bat-contributions seem to have been a bit overshadowed of late.)