Amity Shlaes’ Coolidge

Henry Mencken, who scorched most American presidents in his writings, lowered the temperature a bit when he wrote about President Calvin Coolidge: “Counting out Harding as a cipher only, Dr. Coolidge was preceded by one World Saver [Woodrow Wilson] and followed by two more [Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt]. What enlightened American, having to choose between any of them and another Coolidge, would hesitate for an instant? There were no thrills while he reigned, but neither were there any headaches. He had no ideas, and he was not a nuisance.”

Mencken was mostly right about Mr. Coolidge: There were no thrills while he reigned because he attended diligently and persistently to the sometimes quiet but always necessary and indispensable tasks of the presidential office. “Never go out to meet trouble,” Coolidge advised. “If you just sit still, nine cases out of ten, someone will intercept it before it reaches you.”

While a very good public speaker, Mr. Coolidge was the opposite of a publicity seeking politician. He was no fiery Teddy Roosevelt, still less a world conquering intellectual like Princeton’s Wilson.

In the post-World War I period, the United States was swimming in debt. The national debt, an astounding 28 billion -- nine times the pre-war debt -- was hanging like a damoclean sword over the country.

Enter President Warren Harding, movie star handsome and determined to return the country to what he called “normalcy.” On economic issues, Amity Shales told a group gathered under the banner of the Yankee Institute in Stamford, Mr. Harding’s mind was in the right place, but his wastrel heart wandered. In no time at all, Mr. Harding was swallowed by the Great White Whale. In Washington, it is never your enemies you have to worry about, especially if you keep them close to your chest. Mr. Harding, the crony capitalist of his day, was never able to put a ten foot pole between himself and the beltway barnacles; before you could say “Teapot Dome,” he was up to his knees in friends who “came to Washington to help” -- themselves.

Mr. Harding -- about whom Alice Longworth Roosevelt, the witty daughter of President Teddy Roosevelt, NEVER would have quipped that he had been “weaned on a dill pickle” – had the good grace to die in office shortly after the top blew off Tea Pot Dome. Mr. Harding’s Vice President, “Silent Cal,” armed with the commonsensical prescriptions of the Harding administration minus the peculation, was then sworn into office, and it was the non-show horse who put the roar into the “Roaring 20’s.”

Said Cal, “We need more of the Office Desk and less of the Show Window in politics. Let men in office substitute the midnight oil for the limelight.” He and his equally silent partner, Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, proceeded to do just that.

Much like President Ronald Reagan, Mr. Coolidge’s near miraculous political success may be attributed in part to the underestimation of his opponents. His political experience was fathoms deep and, while he saw no need to keep Alice Roosevelt in bon mots, he was a practiced public speaker who knew a thing or two about budgets and, perhaps more importantly, character: “Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated failures. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”

Unlike Mr. Reagan, Mr. Coolidge cut spending, and his persistence in doing so paid rich dividends to the real America, that large and sprawling portion of the country that radiates outward from the insular Washington D.C. Beltway. Applying Mr. Mellon’s “scientific taxation” prescriptions to a post-wartime economy, Coolidge and Harding before him slashed a $27 billion debt to $17.65 billion by cutting taxes and spending, which produced a growth geyser that flooded the treasury with surplus dollars. The abstemious Coolidge won office in a landslide, a clear repudiation of the progressive doctrines of his predecessors, most especially Wilson the World Savior.

During her Stamford address, Ms. Shlaes -- also author of “The Forgotten Man,” a well-received exploration of the Great Depression – was asked whether Mr. Coolidge’s economic prescriptions had in any sense “caused” the depression that followed Mr. Hoover’s reign. She answered in the word most often used by Mr. Coolidge during his two terms in office whenever it was put to him that his budget cuts would irreparably harm the economy – “No.”

Ms. Shlaes’ “Coolidge,” at 461 pages, is heavy enough to hurl at your local progressive but is not heavy reading. In a time in which a destructive progressive resurgence fueled by Barack Obama, the obverse of Coolidge, has opened the door to massive public debt, Ms. Shlaes’ book offers more than a retrospective view of a successful anti-progressive politician: “Coolidge” is a handbook for current politicians who would lead us from the brink of a new depression to the quiet and peaceful shores of normalcy.

Clinton in Connecticut

Americans used to wait a decent interval before they set about re-writing history. An example of a recent re-write may be found in an op-ed written by Mark Bowen, who writes for the New Republic. The piece is a glowing review of Ben Affleck’s new film “Argo.”

In the course of his review, Mr. Bowen punctures what he understands to be two grave misunderstandings: 1) that former President Jimmy Carter was too weak to foresee and prevent the Iranian hostage crisis; “in fact, he prepared and launched one of the boldest covert military efforts in American history,” and 2) that President Ronald Reagan “proved to be a lot more willing to deal with the mullahs than Carter ever was.”

In other pieces written by Mr. Bowen, the author of “"Guests of the Ayatollah" is constrained to mention in passing some similarities between the Iranian crisis and recent difficulties in Benghazi, the site of the murder by terrorists of American Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

Despite the head fakes and feigns of the Obama administration, it is now apparent that the assault on the consulate in Benghazi was 1) a terrorist attack, 2) well prepared beforehand by salafists who 3) were likely connected with al-Qaida in the Maghreb to 4) remind the Arab world that the attack on the World Trade Center Towers in New York was but a beginning to a protracted war on Western institutions and the twin “Great Satans” of Israel and the United States.

Most recently,Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has bravely taken a howitzer shell for her team. For more than a week after the initial attack on the consulate, the Obama administration put out to public view a narrative of events in Benghazi that bore as little relationship to real events as does Mr. Obama’s putative autobiography “Dreams from My Father” to an authentic auto-biography. The president's understanding of the attack on the consulate is a prime example of historical revisionism in real time. Fortunately, some news outlets have corrected the record, also in real time.

The notion pedaled by the Obama administration that the attack on the consulate was inspired by an amateur film trailer that defamed the prophet Mohammed, blessings be upon him, is a fiction that now may be put to rest – because there was no protest crowd outside the embassy whipped into a murderous frenzy by the film (version 1), and the non-existent protest crowd therefore could not have been used by terrorists as a blind to cover their attack (version 2).

Not only was the attack on the consulate well-prepared and organized, it was preceded by several disturbing incidents that insufficiently disturbed the complacency of the Obama administration – including a prior attack on the same embassy that blew a forty foot hole into a perimeter wall and an attack on the British ambassador so severe that the Brits closed their embassy. Lt Col Wood, in charge of an American embassy security detail that was removed before the attack on the American consulate, regarded the removal of British diplomats and Red Cross workers as a warning to U.S. diplomats. "I almost expected the attack to come,” he said. “We were the last flag flying; it was a matter of time.”

Documents recently released show that Mr. Stevens had repeatedly requested additional security. On the very day of Mr. Stevens' murder, the ambassador had dispatched a message, literally a cry for help, requesting additional protection for the embassy. In a recent special investigation, Fox News developed a timeline of events that shows the Obama administration had withdrawn security forces prior to the attack.

In biting a very large bullet –Mrs. Clinton has said she alone is responsible for security at the embassies – former President Clinton’s wife may have rescued part of a tattered fictional narrative used by the president and his apologist so far to escape direct responsibility for the murder of four Americans on what even the Ayatollah Khomeini certainly recognized as American diplomatic territory in a foreign country.

Here is the open question: When Mr. Clinton visits Connecticut sometime around the 28^thof October, will he be asked by Connecticut’s fearless media any questions that might incommode him or Mr. Obama's re-election effort? Or can we expect, as usual, the usual fluff?

The New Poor And The New Social Order

There are actually two social-political orders, conservative and liberal, one of which, depending upon one’s ideological proclivities, apparently has been constructed by the devil. Both views are rooted in sociological perceptions.

A dependable sociology will reason from facts, which are, according to Jim Manzi writing in National Affairs, both prophetic and distressing.

Surveying the last half century, Mr. Manzi can not help but notice a deplorable cultural bifurcation: “Increasingly, our country is segregated into high-income groups with a tendency to bourgeois norms, and low-income groups experiencing profound social breakdown.”

Mr. Manzi traces the collapse of bourgeois morality to a longstanding academic and avant garde assault on traditional social norms associated with the left in the 1960’s. By the 1970’s, “attitudes and behaviors began to change on a mass scale.” But every radical social action leads ineluctably to an equal and opposite reaction; and the resistance, when it arrived, was both economic and social.

Beginning with the Nixon administration and trailing into the Reagan administration, the reaction concerned itself with questions of social cohesion and stability, inextricably linked, conservatives and libertarians argued at the time, with the promotion of economic growth and vitality.

The partly successful response did not touch what Manzi calls “the other side of the coin.” The animated opposition failed to notice that economic dynamism could be “harmful to social cohesion.” Inexorably, “the cultural foundations of democratic capitalism were collapsing. Crime rates, illegitimacy, drug use, and many other measures of social dysfunction were all on the rise, seemingly without limit.”

Later in the decade and continuing through today, American society re-normalized, but the new normal is different than the old normal:

“To begin with, certain strands of the old bourgeois consensus have frayed, and others have simply disappeared, at least for some parts of the population. The wealthier and better-educated segments of our society, for example, have re-established the primacy of stable families and revived their intolerance of crime and public disorder. But they have combined this return to tradition with very non-traditional attitudes about sex, masculinity, and overt piety.”

Most importantly, the partial social restoration did not trickle down to what the well-to-do used to call, disparagingly, the lower orders. Among the wealthier and better educated segments of American society today, the primacy of stable families and a healthy intolerance of crime and public disorder has revived; not so among the poor. Consider:

 “Women without high-school diplomas are now about three times as likely to divorce within ten years of their first marriage than their college-educated counterparts… the estimated percentage of 15-year-olds living with both of their biological parents is far lower in the United States than in Western Europe.” In 1965, “almost no mothers with any level of education reported that they had never been married. While this is still true of mothers who have finished college, only 3 percent of whom were never married, the figure among mothers with no more than a high school education and incomes below $20,000 is an astounding 25 percent. About 70% of African-American children — as well as most Hispanic children — are born to unmarried mothers.”

Among the middle and upper classes, what Manzi calls “the Old Wasp Ascendency” has been reconstructed on much different platforms:

“Political correctness serves the same basic function for this cohort that ‘good manners’ did for an earlier elite; environmentalism increasingly stands in for the ethic of controlling impulses so as to live within limits; and an expensive, competitive school culture — from pre-K play groups up through graduate school — socializes the new elite for constructive competition among peers. These Americans have even re-created the old WASP aesthetic preference for the antique, authentic, and pseudo-utilitarian at the expense of vulgar displays of wealth. In many cases, they live in literally the same homes as the previous upper class.”

This social paradigm, appropriate for a vigorous capitalistic economy, serves the new elite well enough. The old WASP elite, supported by a much different moral, religious and sociological matrix, was able to pass along prosperity and well-being to those on a lower rung of the social latter. It is very much an open question whether the new order is capable of showering similar blessings upon the fatherless 70 percent of African American children who receive very different messages from their subcultures, sociological offshoots of the anarchic 1960s.

Joe Lieberman And His Enemies

U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman’s principled stand in favor of ending the invidious “don’t ask don’t tell” policy in the U.S. military has elevated him to heroic status among some liberals, but the news continues to rasp the more tender consciences of puritanical progressives who feel they must applaud Mr. Lieberman’s efforts even as they strenuously condemn the man.

All this hero worship, Greg Hladky writes in the Fairfield Weekly, is a Washington beltway distortion: “Isn't it interesting how different the Lieberman situation appears down in Washington compared to the Lieberman reality back home?... Lieberman stands virtually no chance of winning the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination.”

Here at home in the progressive camp, Mr. Lieberman’s dark deeds will not easily be forgotten or forgiven. Mr. Hladky ticks off a familiar bill of particulars:

“It wasn't just Lieberman's unquestioning support for the Iraq war that produced the hostility. It wasn't just Joe's affectionate closeness to George W. Bush, or his decision to speak at the 2008 Republican National Convention and campaign for his buddy John McCain and against Barack Obama, or his suggestion that he might support Republican Linda McMahon in Connecticut's U.S. Senate race this year.

“It was all those things and the feeling that Joe has for a long time considered himself better than the Connecticut Democrats who used to believe in him, who used to think they knew who he was.”

Mr. Lieberman’s position and perseverance on the issue of gays in the military received at the more moderate New London Day an encouraging response: “Sen. Lieberman's determination to reverse the policy may help redeem his reputation in his home state, with which he has had a love-hate relationship in recent years.”

The loss of a party primary “due in large part to his unrelenting support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan” forced Mr. Lieberman to run as an independent in 2006 and “compelled him, ill-advisedly, to support John McCain for president in 2008, and ironically the GOP senator from Arizona emerged as one of the most vocal opponents of ‘don't ask, don't tell.’"

Some progressives might quibble somewhat with the word “compelled”; the senator is, after all, a grown man and well above the age of reason. Politicians generally are “compelled” to do or say this and that in the same sense that the denizens of bordellos are compelled to do business with each other. Time and chance have not treated kindly some legislators who bolted their parties to run as independents. Neither Charlie Crist (R-I-Fl) nor Arlen Specter (D-R-D-PA) are serving any longer in the U.S. Congress.

Mr. Lieberman incautiously has left in his wake a rich store of UTube clips tracing the outline of what progressive consider his rank betrayal of the left wing of their party. Could he defend himself, Mr. Lieberman likely would say, along with former President Ronald Reagan, that his party left him, though at least one progressive in Mr. Lieberman’s party, President Barack Obama, has since assuming office veered to the middle on issues of war and peace. Tactically, Mr. Obama’s position on Afghanistan bears a striking resemblance to former President George Bush’s position on Iraq.

Similar campaign killer clips – which save lazy commentators the necessity of thinking seriously about issues – were used successfully to torpedo Linda McMahon’s campaign for the U.S. Senate. These bloody slices of demagoguery are the equivalents of knives drawn across the throats of people who cannot argue with damning visuals: wrestlers slamming each other in the ring, Mr. Lieberman bussing Mr. Bush on the floor of congress. Mrs. McMahon was also unfortunate enough to have earned her millions to self finance her campaign; and while Mr. Lieberman is no multi-millionaire, he does have more than a million campaign bucks socked away under his pillow in case one or another of his potential Democratic challengers should summon the courage to attempt to beard the lion in his den.

Mr. Lieberman’s challengers so far are being coy, perhaps hoping that the senior senator from Connecticut will follow U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd’s sterling example and leave the senate after his weak points have been sufficiently probed by assassins in the media who really should be supporting term limits.

That’s right, term limits. Good for what ails you, term limits would have the same beneficial effect on a sclerotic political system that the retirements of Mr. Dodd Mrs. Rell this year have had in Connecticut on media sales. When time servers leave the political arena, things begin to pop. People come out of the woodwork to vote, patriotism flutters from every street corner, and nearly everyone sinks happily into the comforting illusion that this time the country as a whole will enjoy, in the immortal world of Mr. Abraham Lincoln “a new burst of freedom.”