When Will the Democrats Ever Learn*

 

From Virginia to New Jersey to Long Island to Minneapolis to Seattle the Democrats got shellacked in Tuesday’s voting. They forgot that America is primarily a centrist country and that they only have bare majorities in the House and Senate. Simply put, even as I write this, they are over-reaching in their attempts to pass the Build Back Better reconciliation bill in the House. They do not understand that you cannot rewrite America’s social contract with bare majorities; they need the majorities that FDR and LBJ put together in 1933 and 1964, respectively. Further Biden was elected to stop the craziness of Trump, not to usher in an overarching expansion of the welfare state. (See my Open Letter to President Biden Shulmaven: An Open Letter to President Joe Biden)

 

On a more local level the Democrats have forgotten the role of engaged parents in the education of their children. Although technically Critical Race Theory was not taught in Virginia’s schools, many of the aspects of the theory are being taught. It is obvious if you accuse all white people of being inherently racist, perhaps more than a few would be turned away and that is precisely what happened in Virginia. And it is understood that “defund the police” is an absolute loser.

 

If the Democrats are going to have a chance to hold their slender majorities in Congress next year, they are going to have to abandon the crazy town ideas of the “woke” left. The Squad and their acolytes live in very insular worlds. If they ever ventured out into the real world, they would realize how off-putting their ideas are. As long as Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer cozy up to them, the Democrats will be in a world of hurt in 2022. Better they should heed the words of Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.

*With apologies to Pete Seeger

 

An Open Letter to President Joe Biden

 

Mr. President:

 

I voted for you in the Democratic Primary. I did not vote for Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, but it seems you are trying to implement most of their policies to a T, a wholesale expansion of the welfare state. I guess you visualize yourself as the second coming of either FDR or LBJ. I hate to break it to you, but you do not have their raw political talent, and more importantly you don’t have their huge majorities in Congress to implement your program.  When I voted for you in the general election I had more modest aims, to restore respect for our government and achieve at least a modicum of competency. Given your predecessor that would be a huge accomplishment and you were terrific out of the starting gate.

 

However, with respect to competency, you botched up our withdrawal from Afghanistan, you are presiding over an immigration crisis on the Mexican border, and it appears, at times, that the CDC doesn’t know which end is up. Your climate agenda is a theme park of policy incoherence. You ask OPEC to pump more oil, while at the same time working to shut down domestic production. And you rejected out of hand a carbon tax which your Secretary of the Treasury fully advocated before she entered government. Further it is beyond me why you didn’t push for an immediate vote on the infrastructure bill when you had the chance. Its passage would have been a great confidence building measure all around. Instead, you listened to the shrill voices on the Left.

 

With each passing day I am losing respect for our government with a host of small unforced errors based on the faculty lounge world of political correctness.  Why did your Administration put out documents calling mothers “birthing people?” Your administration uses the term “Latinx,” a term by and large rejected by the Hispanic community. Come on Mr. President, these are not the words of a kid from Scranton.

 

In my view Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are saving your presidency. The two of them are pushing you into the middle so you can be the candidate I and I believe most of the country voted for. Listen to them and the path will be open to a very successful presidency.

My Amazon Review of Marc Wortman's "1941:Fighting the Shadow War: A Divided America in a World at War"

Prelude to War

America’s entry into the Second World War has been told many times before, perhaps best in recent years by Michael Fullilove and Susan Dunn. Thus historian Marc Wortman faced a difficult task to add value. He partially succeeds and he does it with the writing style of a novelist making the book easy to read. Where he is most interesting is in presenting the very active American role in the famous sinking of the German battleship Bismarck and his very lengthy discussion of Phillip Johnson who would become a world famous architect, as a very active Nazi sympathizer who was almost indicted for treason. He also covers the role of the young Nelson Rockefeller as a state department official organizing our efforts to counter Nazi influence in Latin America.

He leaves out Dean Acheson’s role in coming up with the legal analysis that enabled FDR’s bases for destroyers deal and the role of American communists in their shifting from being pro-war to anti-war and back to pro-war as they cleaved to the party line coming out of Moscow.

As a result if a reader is not familiar with the history, Wortman’s book would be a good start in learning how Roosevelt with starts and stops moved the Nation to face the reality of the Nazi menace. 

For the full Amazon URL see:

https://www.amazon.com/review/R1QY8ON1I0ZICC/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of Susan Dunn's, "1940: FDR, Willkie, Lindbergh, Hitler-the Election Amid the Storm"

Susan Dunn has written a wonderful follow-up to her "Roosevelt's Purge." We move from Roosevelt's intra-party fight of 1937-38 to his his preparations for war in 1940 and 1941. Her title, although flashy, is much more about Roosevelt than Willkie, Lindbergh and Hitler and the story extends beyond the election of 1940. Roosevelt and the internationalist Hamiltonian Republicans are the clear heroes and clear villains are Lindbergh and the isolationist majority in the Republican Party. Roosevelt dominates the action with his masterly setting up the politics for his unprecedented third term and his great speeches pushing the country towards war. However, Dunn gives too much credit to his speeches but fails to note the lack of immediate action thereafter. For example not much happened after his state of emergency speech in May 1941. In many respects Roosevelt feared that he was getting too far ahead of public opinion, when in fact, he very likely was lagging behind the popular will, at least in 1941.

Dunn's portrait of Willkie shows him clear eyed in the face of the Nazi menace and way ahead of his time with respect to civil rights. Unlike Roosevelt, who was too dependent on the racist southern Democrats, Willkie was a full thoated supporter of Negro rights in the early 1940s. It is here where I have my main quibble with Dunn's book. In order to keep her plot-line going she all but ignores the critical support given to Roosevelt's foreign policy by the very Jacksonian and very racist southern Democrats. Without internationalists like Georgia Senater Walter George, a target of the failed 1938 purge, Roosevelt's whole enterprise of aiding Britain in its time of desperation would have floundered on the rocks. For a full discussion of the South's role in the foreign policy of the period I would recommend Ira Katznelson's, "Fear Itself...."

I also have two other quibbles. She ignored the role of future Secretary of State Dean Acheson's legal opinion in support of the destroyer for bases deal of 1940 and while she mentions the role of German intelligence in aiding the isolationist forces, she completely ignored the the role Britain's agent, William Stephenson in pushing America into the war.

All told Susan Dunn has written a fine book which vividly captures an era where politics really mattered and the American people really cared.