It was my opinion six months ago that if presidential candidates were selected the old way by the boys in the back room, they'd point their cigars at the kid from North Carolina as their best bet to make a run against George Bush. They would have seen right off that Gephardt was past his sell-by date, that Liebermans religion is a handicap in current world politics, that Al Sharpton is a race-baiter, that Dennis Kucinich looks and acts like a high school sophomore, and General Wesley Clark don't know nothing and can't get that right, as Sam Ervin used to say.
A suspicious person could think Clark entered the race to deflate the former front-runner Howard Dean, who fell on his face in the Iowa caucuses and sealed his ultimate defeat in New Hampshire with a tirade after finishing third. The boys in the back room would never put Dean on the agenda anyway, realizing early on that he exudes an unsettling volatilitynot the kind of guy you want near the nuclear trigger.
After Iowa and New Hampshire, John Kerry and Howard Dean are the frontrunners, while Edwards coming in third was a shock to the media, but not to the back room boys. Kerry was able to rally what's left of the post-JFK Democrat core, a mixture of idealistic social activists who cut their teeth on the Great Society and the anti-Vietnam movement. This anachronistic cadre of limousine liberals, Hollywood airheads, most of the mass media, about all of the university establishment, remnants of the Labor vote, black groups (who will fall in line as Sharpton evaporates), and a cross-section of working Americans who hate Republicans for the hell of it, rallied behind Kerry, led by the last link to the New Frontier, the distended Teddy Kennedy.
Although the rankings will shift as the meatier primaries come and go, Kerry is likely to fade in the long run as the factions within the Democrat faithful attack each other and Kerry too. The zany far Left of the party will demand that the Kerry campaign pull out of Iraq, dismantle the military, curtail economic growth and establish one world government. Moderate Democrats will talk Kerry and vote Bush. The boys in the back room know this. Besides, Kerry looks eerily like Edmund Muskie.
That leaves John Edwards, the back room pick from the beginning. The hyper-ambitious trial lawyer is smart, good-looking and energetic. If we run him against Bush, say the boys, even if he loses, we have put a fresh face on the Party with a candidate who will run until he drops carrying the Democrat agenda with all banners unfurled right up the steps to the convention floor. And hell, he might win. Look at Clinton in 92. He was the 8th man in the Democrat field. He clawed his way to the nomination with pure energy, an unabashedly aw-shucks personality, good looks and near-nuclear energy. Sound like Edwards to you? If he can't gain the nomination, lets put him on the ticket as vice president say the boys. He's the face of the future for the Democrats.
One analysis after Edwards nabbed the red ribbon in Iowa noted that the candidate was very effective one-on-one, a key asset to winning elections. But what caught my attention was the issue Edwards hit upon that appears to have contributed to his showing: predatory lenders. The people in Iowa, and I'd wager across the country, are tired of being kicked around by credit-card companies, banks, retail lenders, utilities, cell-phone providersjust about all the corporate vendors who have taken the attitude that the customer is the victim. Like Iowans, the rest of us are being plucked and bullied by the suits, aided now with invasive software programs, hired to speed up cash flow on the backs of working people. Voters feel threatened by creditors and service providers, each of whom requires bill payers to submit to their own petty schedule. Edwards should run with this issue Is the Bush team listening?
NOTES FROM LA-LA LAND
Downtown Gulags
Speaking of the corporate fascism rampant today, don't go to downtown Raleigh until the predations of the parking trolls are curtailed. Even though there is good news that the center-city area will be improved even more with the tearing down of the antiquated Fayetteville Street Mall, the addition of a much-needed convention and hotel complex and other initiatives to keep the heart of the City beating, certain private property owners continue to militarize their petty pieces of turf, risking the results of hard work over many years.
Let me add that I served as chairman of Raleighs first Downtown Advisory Committee. I was an early advocate for revitalizing the center city, dedicating my time and energy and ink in my publications to the cause over the past 20-plus years.
Now I am not so sure it was worth it after my experience in mid-January when out-of-town visitors accompanied us for birthday celebration to a favorite restaurant of ours that we patronize and promote to others. Our two cars pulled into the restaurant lot near Moore Square as we have done for several years. It was freezing cold as we stepped out into the parking lot where you could barely see newly installed signs demanding payment for parking.
We assumed they were directed at daytime drivers, as is usually the case, and besides you couldn't read them until we confronted a sign marring the restaurant entrance demanding $3. We saw the sign, couldn't figure out how to pay, entered, dined and the parking was forgotten. In a spacious mood after our meal, the six of us returned to our cars and Wham! Thud! We are confronted with a yellow clamp on the rear left wheel of our guests car.
I was humiliated, embarrassed and furious that our out-of-town guests, who had been hearing me brag about the progress being made downtown, were the victims. The guest then used the restaurant phone to call a number written on the back of a tag attached to the clamped wheel. I remained visibly upset and wanted to know from the proprietress how she could allow this to happen. She screamed back that she warned me, and I screamed back that I couldn't figure out how to pay the parking fee since I couldn't read the signs in the dark. Besides, from what I could see, it appeared impossible to pay the fee anyway. Couldn't she have told us we were in danger or done it for us? Its not as if we were avoiding payment. Even biker bars let their patrons know they are about to be towed or clamped. And how come, since its her restaurant, she is forcing her customers to be inconvenienced by creating a little gulag alongside her eatery. I was not warned of this when we called for reservations, and there was no person taking up money, just signs and a strange machine, barely visible in the night. Once again, the customer, in my case a loyal patron, is the victim.
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Calling All Cars
Soon a security SUV arrived with official verbiage splashed about the door panels operated by a female, who, after threatening to call the police when I opined that she wasnt a real cop at alljust a parking company martinetput out her hand to collect the $50 Immobilization fee. Out of embarrassment for my City, I felt I should pay the bribe, against the protestations of our guest, and luckily located three $20 bills to which the rent-a-cop, who has obviously not attended etiquette classes, responded brusquely, we can't make no change. Infuriated, I asked her: then how do I, or other victims of this outrage, deal with that? Leave the car to be stripped? What if they didn't have the money since you take only cash? Another search discovered a $10 bill and that part of the ordeal passed. The guests car was unclamped and the two automobiles of formerly happy birthday dinner-goers backed out of the parking spaces to get as far away from the scene as fast as we could.
But the parking companys little Nazi blocked the exit. So I am back into the fray, knocking on her window feeling like a figure in a Kafka novel until, for reasons still unknown to me, she pulled away in her fake police car, and we were free at last. But none of us is free of the sickening feeling that still lingers over our trip to patronize downtown Raleigh. I returned to the scene and took pictures of the signs, to satisfy myself that any normal human could not have figured out how to pay the $3 fee in the dark. The signs, that conjure up images of Soviet Bloc border crossings, ask you to put the exact fee into an automat-looking device using your parking space numberthat you can't see well in the dark anywayusing a dangling chunk of metal to shove the bills in the slot. I finally figured out that the parking goons then check the back of the box for cash. If empty, they take control of your private property to hold you hostage to extort $50.
I now know that the lot is owned by a woman who asked the owners of the restaurant, since their customers use it, to help her defray the cleaning and tax costs of maintaining it for a nominal sum. The owners, I hear, refused and the lot owner did what she had to do. Although I am sympathetic to her need to create revenue to maintain the lot, I am surprised she resorted to a draconian solution. What is shocking, however, is that the owners of the restaurant did not think of their customers first and work out a solution.
Its like I say, the danger to our security and dignity and freedom today is not entirely from the police or government regulation. Its from the petty acts of private firms, whether credit-card usurers or private parking companies. Until downtown Raleigh is cleared of these crude practices, all the progress achieved and underway will be for naught.
What must our guests think of Raleigh?
Can Yale Dean Rescue Duke From Radicals?
Did a little research (my brother and his daughter are Elisyou know for Eli Yale) and discovered Duke University has hit a home run in the bottom of the 9th by attracting English professor Richard Brodhead, Dean of Yale College, to succeed Nan Keohane as president. Brodhead, who opined that if the new job does not include tickets to Blue Devil basketball games, I hope someone will tell me right away, was chairman of the Committee on Yale College Education (the Brodhead Report) that calls for a comprehensive overhaul of the undergraduate curriculum.
In another basketball analogy, a Yale faculty member said Brodhead is to articulation what Michael Jordan was to basketball. And articulation is the centerpiece of the Brodhead Report. He told the Yale Daily News that the existing set of distributional requirements is spectacularly vague about the skills it expects students to build strength in. The Report revises the Yale course of study to ensure that the 2000 course offerings now available are molded into a coherent liberal education by insisting that each undergraduate take two courses that emphasize writing skills and two courses that stress quantitative reasoning, says a piece in the January-February Yale Alumni Magazine. Another change addresses onerous foreign language requirements that have resulted in students graduating without ever taking an English course. The idea that the system brings people to Yale and then discourages them from taking English courses is just nuts, said Brodhead.
Brodhead is likely to go nuts when he sees the damage done to higher education in the wake of the Stanley Fish era at Duke. The school, by hiring Brodhead, has seen the error of allowing the post-modern deconstructionists to snatch away its credibility and national reputation. Are UNC and NCSU watching?
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Tony Blair Sets Example
I tuned in the national evening news the night of the New Hampshire primary hoping there would be coverage of the Tony Blair vote of confidence in the UK Parliament. Instead I was confronted with ABCs Peter Jennings stating with a straight face that New Hampshire voters were turning out in record numbers to vote against the war in Iraq. Now wait a minute. Bias is one thingwe have learned to accept it in the national mass mediabut blatantly lying and shamelessly misusing the airwaves to advance a point of view indicate how far away from objectivity the network faces will go to run roughshod over ethics to mislead the public. Networks aren't licensed but local stations are. WTVD-TV, the owned and operated ABC affiliate in Durham, needs to be held responsible when license renewal time rolls around.
In a splendid coincidence, as Peter Jennings is shilling for the anti-Bush forces, in the UK Tony Blair has been cleared by the official Hutton Inquiry of wrong-doing emanating from accusations by the state-owned British Broadcasting Company that he sexed up intelligence reports to sell the British public on joining the US in the war on Saddam. BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan, the source for the erroneous reports (which also led to the suicide of a public official), has been exposed for what he and the BBC did to damage Blair by abusing the sanctity of the airwaves using false reporting designed to bring down a government.
Blair stood up and fought and won, and in the process sent a message to journalists and news organizations that the people are disgusted with the medium sending its own message by using its power to slant the news to suit its own agenda. I recommend an Inquiry here, perhaps a Congressional Panel, to investigate the ethics of our major news outlets in the US. Peter Jennings can be called first to testify.