The most conservative President?

I am a socialist. I have never belonged to a socialist party, but I have considered myself a socialist since my teens, some 60 years now. Of the nonrevolutionary, social democrat persuasion, but a socialist nonetheless. And so, when I hear politicians and pundits of the American right wing refer to Barack Obama or his policies as “socialist,” I can only smile inwardly and say to myself, “I wish.”

Even when they call him a “radical,” the designation is pathetically absurd. To me, Obama is the most conservative American President in my memory, and probably since Herbert Hoover.

Don’t get me wrong. To the extent that, in American politics, “conservative” (in contrast to “liberal”) is a catchword (whether as an adjective or a noun)  for right-wing policies and their adherents, then Obama is a “liberal.” But in the common, nonpolitical sense of the word — meaning ‘cautious, averse to deviating from established norms’ — Obama is truly conservative. George W. Bush, by contrast, was quite radical.

In medicine, a conservative treatment is one that does not involve surgery or intervention.  And that describes rather precisely Obama’s attitude to curing the many societal ills that afflict his nation. Do nothing drastic; just keep Wall Street going by giving the banks money; keep gays in their military closets and don’t let them marry; keep healthcare in the hands of private insurers; keep the Bush wars going along with government secrecy and indefinite detention of suspects. To the extent that Bush policies — many of them radical departures from tradition — are merely cosmetic pimples, like allowing roadbuilding in the wilderness, then it’s okay to excise them. But deep incisions? No, at least not for now.

When it comes to dealing with other countries, including “enemies” like Iran or North Korea, I rather like Obama’s cautious approach, a welcome relief from the Bush-era swagger. But in matters of war and security, he shows undue deference to military professionals rather than listen to the wise old adage that war is too important to be left to the generals. In this respect he, a man with no military experience, resembles Lyndon Johnson, who despite his Silver Star saw virtually no action in World War II. (By contrast Harry Truman, a combat veteran of World War I, was not afraid to fire MacArthur when the situation called for it.)

Sometimes Obama sounds as if he wished that the situation he is in would allow him to pursue a bolder course. But he seems to have a visceral fear upsetting the applecart, even if it’s going the wrong way, lest his impeccably conservative attire be spattered by the applesauce made by the fallen fruit.

Our leaders

OK, Tim Geithner has been confirmed.  So now we have a Treasury Secretary who doesn’t pay his taxes (until he’s caught) and a Chief Justice who doesn’t know the Constitution. What next?

Vowels and consonants

The rumor that Andrew Cuomo is likely to become the next junior Senator from New York reminds me of the time, probably in 1991, when his father, Mario Cuomo, was considering a run for the Presidency. I remember someone saying that he had no chance — that Americans would not elect a President with more vowels than consonants in his name.

Of course, when Americans talk about vowels and consonants, they usually mean letters, not sounds. In fact, phonemically Cuomo is /kwomo/ and consequently has three consonants and two (identical) vowels (which are most often realized as diphthongs of some sort). But in common parlance “vowel” means one of the letters AEIOU and “consonant” means any other letter. And except for Monroe and Hoover, whose names have three of each (but in each case two of the vowel letters form a digraph), all other Presidents of the United States had surnames with more consonant letters than vowel letters.

At last, the pattern is broken. In Obama the vowels win, both phonemically and orthographically.

Update. The latest news is that the new Senator from New York will be Kirsten Gillibrand. The consonants win again!

Better late than never?

Bernard Kouchner is one of the few people in public life whom I have long admired, whether as a principled humanitarian (he was the founder of Médecins Sans Frontières but left it on a matter of principle) or as a practical politician (he was France’s Minister of Health in several left-wing governments and is now, without compromising his leftist politics, Foreign Minister in a right-wing government). And so, when he said last week that he was “very happy” about the prospects of the Annapolis Conference for peace in the Middle East, I felt at least mildly encouraged.

For seven years I have lived with the embarrassment of having written an essay, “Thoughts on the 2000 Election,” in which I wrote, among other things, that “a Bush – that is, a Republican – administration would have another advantage over Gore: it would not be burdened with the pro-Israel bias of the Democratic Party due (at least in part) to its heavy Jewish influence” and that “the highly effective Israel lobby would [not] altogether lose its clout in a Bush administration…” [but] “such an administration would have more freedom of action in imposing some tough choices on Israel.”

Of course I had no way of knowing that, in matters of international policy and security, the Bush administration would in fact become the Cheney rule, and that the paranoid neo-Nazi fantasy of the Zionist Occupation Government (“ZOG”) would become a reality, with many high-ranking officials (Wolfowitz, Perle, Abrams and their ilk) constituting, practically, a Washington cell of the Likud.

Now these people are gone, along with their enforcer Don Rumsfeld, and while Dick Cheney retains his constitutional position, his name is rarely heard outside of jokes. The Annapolis Conference represents the kind of initiative that I was so naively hoping for back in the year 2000.

The impression that I’ve been gathering from the media is that it’s too little, too late. And perhaps late is not better than never. Perhaps a fresh start in a new administration might have a better chance. But it never hurts to feel vindicated, even if very late.

Feeling safer

Doesn’t it make us Americans feel safer, having our money spent on fighting a war against a nonexistent, or at least disembodied, enemy — terror, after all, is a state of mind, not an armed force — instead of repairing our bridges?