September 3, 2015--Jeb's Pique

Once front-runner Jeb Bush is unraveling.

We all knew that preppy Jeb for whom everything came easily as destined for people of his background and class was potentially touchy about a few subjects--his brother, his father, his mother.

But allowing Donald TRUMP to get under his skin, nouveau riche Donald? Classless, tasteless, parvenu Donald? (Why am I using so many French words?)

It was bad enough he had to deal with the likes of a Scott Walker and Rick Perry. Such, I suppose, is the life of anyone who wants to be anointed president.  Treat them like help, he must have thought, and it will soon be over.

But Donald TRUMP!

Well, yes.

The New York Times reported yesterday that The Donald's let-it-rip style of campaigning is making poor Jeb crazy.

This is not what he bargained for. TRUMP's slash-and-burn kind of politics is just what he loathes most about running for office. He's much more comfortable in polite conversations about policy, policy, policy.

But to have to get down in the mud with the likes of the bloated billionaire from Queens, of all places. If he has to do that, is the presidency, the family business, worth it?

Good question which for Jeb will be resolved in a few months after he gets trounced in Iowa and New Hampshire. Forget South Carolina. South Carolina! Not his kind of place at all. Tacky, tacky.

Jeb thought all he needed to do was lose the flab so he would appear lean-and-mean, produce a couple of hundred policy papers, trot out his Mexican wife to secure the Hispanic vote, and to top it off speak a little Spanish.

So what is he getting in return? Mainly mockery from TRUMP.

One thing that seems to gall him more than the rest of TRUMP's mockery is the assertion that Bush is "low energy."

"Hey, Donald, have you checked out my new waistline? And, by the way, you could use a little work on your own."

Bush is so rattled by the jibe that he lacks energy that he has taken to talking about it on the campaign trail. A fatal political mistake.

"I'll just give you a little taste of the 'low energy' candidate's life this week," he said, and then went on to tick off a list of places he had been during the past two day--McAllen, Texas; Salt Lake City; Denver; Birmingham; Greensboro; and Pensacola.

Pensacola, I'm sure he thought, The things one has to do. Can't we just skip to the Inauguration and get to the noblesse oblige part?

"The 'low energy' candidate," he continued, "this week has only been six days, 16 hours a day campaigning with joy in my heart."

Poor you.

What's worse, he's making it to easy for Saturday Night Live writers.

But here's the problem--TRUMP is right.

Bush lacks energy, which is another way of saying that he is too patrician for the rough-and-tumble of a gloves-off contest and is evidence that he really doesn't want to make the effort to win the job.

He wants it bequeathed to him like pretty much everything else has been in his life.

Maybe he should have listened to Mother--"We've had enough Bushes."

March 31, 2015--Hillary's Hair

There was a flap last week when Michelle Obama showed up on Jeopardy with what appeared to be a shaved head. The photos I saw tended to confirm that. She looked real good to me but I could only imagine what they must have been saying about her in the Heartland.

"You see. I told you. She's a militant. A black militant, and this proves it."

Well, there were official White House denials (about the hair). It seems she had her actual hair pulled way back in a tight bun.

This obsession about First Lady hair is nothing new. It goes back at least to Mamie Eisenhower's bangs and there was tons of commentary about Jackie's bouffants. But nothing, nothing like all the ink that has been spilled about Hillary Clinton's literally dozens of different looks. From her days when Bill was first a presidential candidate (shoulder-length hair and headband)  right up to this month (short, slightly off-center part, no bangs).

When I think about other prominent professional women (and men) most have "signature" hairdos. Condi Rice has that lacquered helmet with a dip of hair swept onto the left side of her forehead, Barbara Bush has that crown of soft white-gray curls, Dianne Feinstein consistently has a sweep of dark brown waves, Elizabeth Warren that unchanging Page Boy plus rimless signature glasses, while Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton's and Barack Obama's hair pretty much always looks the same, albeit in Obama's case grayer day by day.

Even those political women who have made some changes along the way have not done so as radically as Hillary. Senators Barbara Boxer and Kirsten Gillibrand come to mind.

When I asked Rona and Cousin Esther about this, simultaneously they said, "You just don't get it." But, I pointed out to them that they themselves have not swung from style to style over the years. Maybe this year a little longer, perhaps next a bit shorter. But that's pretty much it.

But do all the changes tell us anything about Hillary that we should know when considering her for the presidency?

Plenty. Just as her shape-shifting move from name to name to name tells us something.

Is she Mrs. Bill Clinton? Hillary Clinton? Hillary Rodham? Hillary Rodham Clinton? All of the above? Most likely the latter--all of the above--which would not be uncharacteristic of women of her generation who came to embrace feminism later in life. Women who had been raised to think that life for them would be determined largely by who they married. And then, in many cases, when that didn't prove to be satisfactory they came to acquire a liberated consciousness as fully formed adults--they weren't born to it as later generations of women were. Their feminism was put on, applied to an already-exisiting, well-developed sense of self.

But as with other forms of gender and cultural identities taken on later in life they do not always sit well. They are never fully assimilated, there are contradictions; and thus, in Hillary Clinton's case (a very special case indeed considering husband Bill's aberrant behavior and Hillary's serial public humiliations), living in the spotlight for decades, filled with unfulfilled ambitions of her own, she tried on different personalities as she tried on different names and hairstyles.

It comes with the territory when 67. All of this is very much who she is. Take it or leave it.

February 10, 2014--Hillary? Mitt? Bill? (Not that Bill)

We know Hillary's running.

There's a book just published, HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton, that provides behind-the-scenes glimpses of her tenure as Secretary of State, a book that could almost be considered a neo-version of the classic "campaign biography." And then there is Hillary's forthcoming book, also largely about her days in the Obama administration.

This will have the HRC authors, Jonathan Allen and Amie Rarnes, making the rounds of the talk shows--coming to Morning Joe I am sure this week--and Hillary herself at the end of the year, taking time off from $200,000-a-pop appearances, also appearing everywhere. All just in time to launch the unofficial stage of her campaign for the presidency. The official announcement will occur during the spring/summer of 2015.

So that's settled. Hillary is a go and, maybe, as reported over the weekend, so is Joe Biden. But he trails Clinton by about 65 points in the latest polls--65 points!--and so, unless there is a looming Clinton scandal (which with them can never be fully ruled out), this plan of Biden's sounds masochistic.

Then, what about the other side? What's happening with the Republicans?

Most dramatic and politically meaningful is the decline and soon-to-be-seen fall of Chris Christie. He was universally acknowledged to be Hillary's most potent opponent because of his ability to attract independent and undecided voters.

But with Christie ostensibly out of the race (no senior Republicans wants to be seen in the same room with him), who has a chance to secure the nomination and can plausibly beat Hillary in 2016?

Rand Paul has a chance to be nominated by the Tea Party and Libertarian GOP base, but in a general election against Hillary would fare as badly as Goldwater did against LBJ in 1964. Mike Huckabee also looks like a base-pandering contender but also would have general election problems--women, for example, will not forget his recent dumb comments about their "out-of-control libidos."

Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio still look like boy scouts. The half-dozen Republican governors talked about as possible candidates are all excruciatingly borrrring. Think Scott Walker and  Bobby Jindal. Jeb Bush has the Bush problem--he's the brother of George (and that's a problem) and Mama Bush has been saying enough already with the Bushes. (And, to be fair and balanced, enough already with the Clintons--more about that in a moment.) Newt, Michele, Rick and Rick, and--my personal favorite from last time around, Herman Cain--have all been there and done that.

In the face of this undistinguished field, the Harold Stassen of the 21st century (young folks google him to find out who he was), Mitt Romney, it is reported, is again beginning to crank things up.

He apparently will be talking very soon with wife Ann to see if she's OK with another campaign. Mitt's 10 or 12 or 15 sons are apparently all on board. The Romneys are finished renovating their California house, with its twin car elevators, and all Mrs. R's dressage horses and Cadillacs are in good shape, so, what the heck, the money's there, life is short, why not.

So with the prospect of Hillary versus Romney I'm having a back-to-the-past moment.

I think Barbara Bush is right--enough with the Bushes, Clintons, and, I'll add, Romneys. We need some outside-the-box candidates to help us think in new ways about how to solve our problems, grow our economy, and restore our place in the world.

Thus, I'm thinking about Bill. Not that Bill. He's inside the box and thankfully the Constitution will not allow him to run again. Not to mention Hillary who would have a few objections. In there cosmology, it's her turn. And then Chelsea's and then . . .

Get Barbara's and my point?

The Bill I'm thinking about is Bill Gates.

Beginning in a college dorm room (OK, it was at Harvard) he built one of the largest and most successful companies ever. Talk about being a job-creator. With all of Microsoft's limitations, its products changed the world for all time. And now as the operational head of the world's largest foundation, he has been intimately involved in education reform, health care, resource conservation, renewable energy, and many other things we as a country, as a society need to pay attention to.

I'm also interested in a president who has real experience running things, not just a Senate staff of five, and is not timid about holding people accountable. Ask Microsoft senior staff about Gate's leadership and fierce efforts to hold them accountable for their work. If people were to screw up in a Gate's administration they wouldn't be retained for months after messing up and then allowed to resign so they can claim to want to spend more time with their families. Enough of that.

We need more than change we can believe in.