By The River

If there is a Democratic dream team for 2008, it would have to be a Presidential ticket headed by former Vice President Al Gore with Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois as his running mate.

Gore seems swept along by a combination of his own hard work and good fortune, namely the Academy Award that went to "An Inconvenient Truth," the film by Davis Guggenheim which portrays Gore's efforts to persuade the world of the real and imminent danger it faces from global warming. Obama, while professing to want the Presidency for himself, just as Gore did in 1988, could do far worse than to accept the second spot on the ticket with perhaps the only candidate in my lifetime who can be said to be a man of destiny. Together they would bring the public a combination of experience, intelligence, and, in the case of Obama, youth, passion, and a gift for public speaking.

If Gore wins the Nobel Peace Prize for his global warming work next October, as many think he will, so much the better. A President Gore with a Nobel Peace Prize would go far toward restoring world respect for America squandered by George W. Bush. We will by 2008 have endured eight lost years in America. We need a Democratic president who can give us back what we lost, or at least as much as possible.

Unlike Sen. Hillary Clinton, Gore has always been right on the Iraq War. In the fall of 2002, months before the war started, he delivered a speech criticizing Bush's rush to war and willingness to sacrifice American civil liberties in the name of fighting terrorism. Obama, too, is clean on Iraq and has been a constant critic of the war.

And of course, there is the issue of the 2000 election. Many Americans believe the election was stolen from Gore in Florida. Even those who don't will look at Gore and wonder how much better America would have been if George W. Bush had not been in office the past eight years. Gore seems far less wooden and less sanctimonious than he did in 2000. The pain of "losing" that election, I think, tempered his passions with irony and self-deprecating humor. Instead of wallowing in anger and self-pity, for which few would have criticized him him if he had, Gore became a true President-in-Exile. He used the bully pulpit of his victimhood to draw world attention to issues he cared about, notably but not exclusively global warming.

We are already seeing a certain hysteria in the rightwing at the Oscar for Gore's film and the prospect of Gore as a candidate in 2008. Witness the classic and prepared-in-advance smear that erupted the day after the Oscars, when it was breathlessly revealed that Gore used twice as much electricity at his Tennessee home than the average American. The smear failed to note, however, that Gore buys renewable energy at a premium and also purchases carbon offsets. In other words, he lives what he preaches. But the weasel brigade counted on the public not understanding that part of the story, even if they heard it a day later. More to come, I'm sure.

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Nothing is clearer than that preserving tax cuts for the very wealthy and continuing the Iraq War are the two utterly sacrosanct parts of the Bush agenda, or whatever you want to call what he does to us. I have pointed out before how the tax cuts for the wealthy (and a smidgen for the middle class) early in the first Bush term have defunded the government and made it impossible for the United States to fund the sort of health and social initiatives, let alone a well-equipped military, that a modern, industrialized, civilized country ought to to have.

Today in Washington, governors from both parties challenged Bush directly to provide more money for funding the Children's Health Insurance Program. Bush gave a flat 'no' in response and told them to spend the money they already have more wisely. In the conservative bible, no government ever spends money wisely. Ever. This is a libel on American democracy, but that hasn't stopped them up till now.

The despicable Bush would go even further and reduce eligibility for CHIP to children in families making less than twice the federal poverty level. Look at it this way: instead of having his wealthy Texas friends pay a little more in tax, an increase that would barely even register in their wallets, Bush would have more children suffer untreated illness and the poor health that all too often is the price of poverty.

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I don't know if this was meant to be black humor. I suspect it was. And God knows, we need some humor to blot out the tragedy of the Iraq War, however briefly.

This letter-to-the-editor was printed today in my hometown paper, the Holland (Mich.) Sentinel:

Iraq must need used cars

To the Editor:

It appears that every photo of Iraq shows a burnt or bombed car. How many cars do these people have to be able to blow them up all over Baghdad?

Now I have a suggestion for America. We certainly have an excess of used cars, and any car lot can attest to this overage. Why not ship them to Iraq? Iraq seems a ready market for these cars. They certainly won't last long and we can deliver another boatload to them to detonate. We could supply them for years, which seems about the length of time it will take for Iraqis to come to a resolution of their problems.

"Used cars for oil," that ought to be our motto.

Larry Ritchie

Hamilton

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According to the London Times, it may be time to bring back the mealtime admonition to children that they should feel guilty about not finishing dinner "because there are starving children in India." It seems that despite the massive growth in India's wealth over the last 15 years, little of that has trickled down to the bottom half of the nation. India has childhood malnutrition rates worse than Ethiopia's.

I've never used that "starving" line with my kids except as a joke, because I believed that dire, desperate poverty had disappeared from India long ago. Same with China. Not that there weren't poor people in India, but I figured with all the tech dollars flowing in and engineering graduates flowing out to Silicon Valley that India must have gotten most of its billion people above the subsistence level. Turns out that's only half right.

What India's experience proves is that free market capitalism alone isn't enough to ensure a decent life for all. Unless a strong central government instititues progressive taxation, and uses some of the money to improve the lot of the lower classes, most of them won't climb to the middle class on their own. But there is another aspect to this. India in fact is known for its large government sector and bureaucracy. There also has to be a large bloc of citizens who aren't poor who demand government take action to help those who are. That is probably the missing piece of the puzzle. After all, India still has the caste system, an atrocity for a 21st century, modern economic giant.

If it is deemed acceptable that some, by accident of birth, are to be perpetually held down, you aren't likely to see the sort of progressive social democracy we enjoyed in America from 1933-89 and still do in many respects. America has always been full of reformers demanding, from either a Christian or leftist viewpoint or both, that government or society must help the poor. But private charity isn't enough. Only a strong central government has the ability to raise the resources to help mass numbers of people in distress.

You feed them, you educate them, and then you reap the benefits of all those healthy, well-schooled young people working to advance your nation instead of groveling in poverty.

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There's nothing weirder than getting up on Presidents Day morning and reading that rightwing publisher Richard Mellon Scaife now believes Bill Clinton was a pretty good president and that he won't be writing checks to anyone seeking to derail Sen. Hillary Clinton's campaign for President in 2008.

Given Scaife's role as funder of the Arkansas Project in the 1990s, which sought any bit of information, no matter how false and scurrilous, that could be used against Bill and Hillary Clinton, and his position as the major sugar daddy of the rise of the American right over the past 25 years, this is akin to waking up and reading that the ACLU now supports Intelligent Design, or that Sen. James Webb (D-Va.) supports an escalation of the Iraq War.

Of course, he may be worried that Hillary will find ways to punish him if she becomes President. Payback is a bitch. Just look at the case of Andrew Mellon, Scaife's ancestor, who went through a lengthy tax evasion trial early in the first term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Although I'm on record as opposing Hillary as the Democratic nominee in 2008, I've always felt that much of the public didn't buy into the conventional wisdom that Hillary was "unelectable" because she was supposedly "tainted" by the ginned-up events of the 1990s. I hope for a variety of reasons, among them her refusal to renounce her vote on the Iraq War Resolution, that she doesn't get the nomination, but if she passes this test with the Democratic electorate she will be formidable candidate in the general election.

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I was waiting for something like this, and now it appears it will happen. The Intelligent Design controversy in Dover, Pa., and the trial in 2005 in U.S. District Court in Harrisburg, Pa., that demolished the concept, is coming to the big screen. No date has been set even to begin filming, but it is for real.

The "untitled Dover project" will have a script by Ron Nyswaner, who has a distinguished scriptwriting pedigree that includes the Oscar-winning "Philadelphia" in 1993. Nyswaner is a native of Clarksville, Pa., a small town midway between Uniontown and Washington, Pa., in the southwestern corner of the state. His most recent script was for "The Painted Veil," which played recently at the Midtown Theatre in Harrisburg. The Dover film will be produced by Lynda Obst, who has an equally long production pedigree ranging from "Adventures in Babysitting" in 1987 to "Sleepless in Seattle." Her most recent film was Kate Hudson's "How To Lose A Guy in 10 Days." No word yet on a director.

U.S. District Judge John Jones III, who ruled that Intelligent Design was not science and could not be taught as science in public schools, said in jest afterward--in the glow of positive attention he received for the decision--that he wanted to be played by actor George Clooney. He bears a passing resemblance to Clooney, but a judge doesn't seem a George Clooney type of role. I suspect the meaty parts will be those of the school board members who forced Intelligent Design on the Dover schools, and the ACLU lawyers who litigated the case.

The Dover film is unlikely to be friendly to the proponents of Intelligent Design, especially the school board members, but I hope it will show restraint and be fair to the Dover residents who were misled by their clergy and other evolution opponents into believing that Intelligent Design was real science. They paid a price in humiliation, in some cases shattered belief, and real cash--the legal fees incurred by the school board will take years to pay off in taxes. The story is loaded with drama, perhaps as much as that other film/play about evolution, "Inherit the Wind," which is being revived on Broadway this spring.

Judge Jones has said his one regret in the case is rejecting a petition from Court TV to televise the trial so people could see the evidence for themselves. If Nyswaner's film is a good one, and there is no reason to think it won't be, perhaps the public will get a second chance.

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Former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, son of former Michigan governor George Romney, followed his father down the Presidential trail this week, calling for a "new American Dream" and a "time of innovation and transformation" in Washington, D.C., in a speech in Michigan announcing his candidacy for the Republican nomination in 2008.

I never quite figured out how Romney got established in Massachusetts politics. Michigan is where his father was a popular, moderate-to-liberal two-term governor from 1963-69. While the term "liberal Republican" may seem incomprehensible to younger readers, they existed in large numbers back then, just as passenger pigeons once did. The elder Romney blew his chances for the Republican nomination in 1968 by stating that he had been "brainwashed," i.e., fed a load of crap, by U.S. officials in South Vietnam when he made a fact-finding visit there in August 1967. George Romney went to Vietnam supporting the war and came back a war critic.

Both George and Mitt visited my hometown of Holland, Michigan, during the annual Tulip Time festival in May. I've seen a photo of the boy Mitt with his father at Tulip Time, both dressed in Dutch costumes to march in the Street-Scrubbing Parade (it's a weird place) that opens the festival.

Whatever else Romney may bring to the Presidency has been obscured by the fact that he's a Mormon, i.e., a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. While the Mormons consider themselves a Christian religion, not everybody else does, especially among the rightwing fundamentalists who are the base of today's Republican Party.

The Wikipedia entry on Mitt's father George Romney (linked above) says his parents left Utah for Mexico (where George was born) when the Mormon Church, as a condition of Utah statehood, renounced polygamy. The article doesn't say George came from a polygamous family, but it's the sort of thing that will be the subject of endless chatter in the months to come. That and the more loopy aspects of current-day Mormonism, such as the protective underwear, aka 'temple garments,' that all practicing Mormons are supposed to wear. All religions have their loopy aspects, but those of Mormonism tend to be odder than most.

You probably won't ever find me linking again to an article by the John Birch Society, but this one on Romney's Mormonism is pretty good. Ultimately, Romney isn't going to turn to the 12 Elders for approval of his policies in the unlikely event he's elected President in what should be a bang-up Democratic year. He's conservative, yes, just as other Mormons tend to be conservative. But whether or not he wears temple garments is just as irrelevant as what elementary school Barack Obama attended in Indonesia.

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The 2008 race for the Democratic nomination for President is down to a three person race with the withdrawal of Sen. John Kerry and the flame-out of Sen. Joe Biden. We are left with three good candidates, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, and Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois. I wouldn't count any of them out at this point, nor do I concede that Sen. Clinton is the odds-on favorite despite her formidable lead in fund-raising.

Iraq is the word. Nothing else matters in this race, just as nothing other than Vietnam mattered in the race for the Democratic nomination in 1968. I don't believe any Democrat can win in 2008 unless he or she firmly and decisively repudiates Bush's Iraq War, admits they were wrong if they voted for the Iraq War Resolution, and promises to bring the troops home within a year. It is instructive to look back 40 years to the 1968 campaign.

President Lyndon B. Johnson had by then presided over four years of what was until now the most unpopular and senseless war in American history (I'd call Vietnam and Iraq even at this point). Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota mounted what was widely seen as a quixotic primary challenge of Johnson in New Hampshire. On March 12, 1968, McCarthy stunned Johnson by getting 42 percent of the vote to 49 percent for the President. Although Johnson technically won, a sitting President should have been able to do far better. Four days later, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, JFK's brother, entered the Democratic race. On March 31, Johnson announced that he would not seek another term as President. Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey then entered the race.

Humphrey was the Hillary Clinton figure in the 1968 race, the candidate with loads of mainstream party support. Just as Clinton refuses to condemn her original support for the Iraq War, for which she was pilloried in New Hampshire last weekend, Humphrey refused to renounce his support for the Vietnam War until very late in the general election campaign, believing he owed Johnson support for his war policy. He lost because of it. So will Clinton if she doesn't go over to the peace side wholeheartedly. She won't even get the nomination.

Humphrey might not have gotten the Democratic nomination in 1968 if Kennedy, who along with McCarthy had made opposition to the war the centerpiece of his campaign, had not been assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian, in June 1968. McCarthy had no chance against the institutional Democratic Party support (read: the Clinton network) that Humphrey could draw on in an era when state parties controlled convention delegate selection to a much greater degree than they do today. A perception by the student Left that their antiwar fervor had been for naught led to the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago later that summer.

Improbably, Republican nominee Richard M. Nixon then became the "peace candidate." Nixon hinted at a secret plan for ending the Vietnam War (it remains a secret to this day) and a nation weary of tens of thousands of combat deaths and even more wounded soldiers and P.O.W.'s responded without really delving too deeply into Nixon's "plan." That and the electoral votes in the Deep South that racist independent candidate Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama took from Humphrey was enough for Nixon to eke out a win. Humphrey was a decent man with a stellar legislative record, but he seemed old and establishment to young Democratic voters. I supported Nixon that year (I was 15 and foolish), the last Republican I supported for President.

If Clinton continues to be wishy-washy on Iraq and faces a Republican candidate who can persuade the electorate that he, too, has a believable plan to end the disaster, a fed-up public may set aside its revulsion toward George W. Bush and vote Republican. But the real question is whether Clinton will bomb out in the primaries, money or no money, institutional support or no institutional support. The difference today from 40 years ago is that primaries choose the candidate. The party leadership can no longer flout public will and install a candidate they like but the public doesn't. And the public wants out of Iraq.

That is why Barack Obama would be a better candidate. Obama has passion, intelligence--you don't get to be president of the Harvard Law Review for anything less than pure talent and intelligence--and a fresh face. He opposed the Iraq War from the beginning, and can dish it out as well as he can take it. He will bring out activists in droves. I suspect blacks will give him the same or better percentages they normally give Democratic candidates, despite the rap advanced by the rightwing black Republican Alan Keyes that Obama is not "real" because he isn't descended from slaves. Something tells me that isn't going to matter a whole lot.

Halfway Hillary, who never saw a squishy, poll-tested moderate position she didn't love, is not who we need to recover from the Bush disaster.

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Admit it. You were wondering if Prince was going to get electrocuted performing in a driving rainstorm during Sunday's SuperBowl halftime show.

But the Minnesota marvel survived--wireless electric guitars make electrocution far less likely these days, although that mike stand, if it had a ground wire, was definitely dangerous. Prince, who is 48, looked not a day older than during his glorious Purple Reign in the early 1980s.

And what a performance! Despite the rainstorm, he and his band and dancers put on one of the best halftime shows in my memory. Opening with "Let's Go Crazy" and closing with "Purple Rain," he gave not an inch to the weather, unlike the fumblin' Bears and Colts. Picking him to do the show was an inspired choice by the NFL.

And how loud will the demands in Miami be tomorrow to build a domed stadium?

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World news organizations are reporting an outbreak of the deadly H5N1 strain of avian influenza on a turkey farm in Britain. The European Union, which does government well, has rules in place for dealing with this sort of thing. As a result, Britain has set up a two-mile protection zone around the farm and a surveillance zone of about 7 miles. The authorities will slaughter as many of the turkeys as is necessary to contain the outbreak.

And well they should. Even with a world that now understands the catastrophe that could result from a worldwide flu pandemic like the one in 1918-19, which killed more people in 24 weeks than AIDS has killed in 24 years, H5N1 is known to have infected 270 humans and killed 60 percent of them. Few other contagious diseases that residents of modern, industrialized nations have any risk of catching are that deadly.

Pennsylvania, or rather Philadelphia, was an epicenter of the 1918 pandemic (a pandemic is an epidemic that affects an entire country, or the world) largely because of troop movements because of the war. I've been reading John M. Barry's excellent book, The Great Influenza. He says the initial outbreak of deadly influenza most likely occurred in Kansas and spread outward to the world from there, again because of troop movements. The pandemic ultimately killed 650,000 Americans, but perhaps 100 million worldwide.

But the real value of Barry's book is to show how unprepared American local health authorities were for a fast-moving flu pandemic which often had a person dead by sundown who was perfectly healthy when the sun rose that day. More than 4,500 people died in one week in Philadelphia alone. No one was available to bury the dead. Even an offer by the city prison to have inmates do it had to be rescinded because too few guards were healthy enough to supervise them. People died in horrible pain, and Barry says the manner of death scared people as much as death itself.

Dealing with both the threat of the H5N1 flu virus and an actual outbreak requires strong, competent, well-funded government at all levels, but most especially at the Federal level. The thought of George W. Bush being President during a pandemic is amost as scary as the disease itself. Imagine the utter incompetence of his Hurricane Katrina response in New Orleans expanded to the the entire country when people are dying in droves. If the pandemic comes, we can only hope it is after the next President takes office in 2009.

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