We all need Obama to step up to this presidential legacy

For my introduction to politics, few experiences can have been as seminal, in my delicate formative years, than seeing posters proclaiming the president of the United States a traitor to his nation.

Shocking sight for an impressionable 10-year old

Since he was assassinated the following day and, even at 10 years of age, I had grasped the fact that an only recently abolished tradition made the sentence for treason death, I could hardly fail to associate the poster with the execution. My parents were horrified but, even without their example, I think I would have been just as shocked myself.

Why am I talking about this now? Partly because we are in the middle of the fiftieth anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis, when that President, John Kennedy, stared done Kruschev and drove him to withdraw Soviet missiles from the island. He did that without firing a single shot or mobilising a single soldier.

It was one of the accusations on the poster: ‘Missile removal - Cuba’ appear among the examples of the ‘innumerable issues’ on which JFK had been wrong (or rather, WRONG). Funnily enough, most of us who lived through the crisis rather thought he’d got it right, and were grateful that he’d found a way out without precipitating a third world war.

Which brings me to the other reason why I’m talking about this now. Last Thursday Joe Biden and Paul Ryan met in the Vice Presidential debate for the 2012 US election. Among other things, Ryan criticised the Obama administration for having ‘called Bashar Assad a reformer when he was turning his Russian-provided guns on his own people’. It’s not strictly true: Hillary Clinton said that people had regarded Assad as possibly a reformer, but that was rather a long time before he’d turned his guns on his people.

However, it isn’t Ryan’s mendacity that interests me here. It’s the implicit accusation that the Obama team is soft on Syria. He wants to get harder? He doesn’t feel that we’ve had about as many entanglements in the Middle East as we need? He thinks the other ones have worked out just dandy for us?

Perhaps he feels it’s time to be more supportive of the friends of the US and tougher on its enemies. That was a concern of the authors of that poster all those years ago: ‘He is betraying our friends (Cuba, Katanga, Portugal) and befriending our enemies (Russia, Yugoslavia, Poland).’

In particular, Ryan’s not keen on working through the United Nations or, as he put it on Thursday, ‘outsourcing our foreign policy to the UN.’ This reprises a theme he announced in August, when he pointed out that the ‘Obama foreign policy is to subjugate ourselves to the United Nations, which gives Russia and China a veto power at the Security Council’.

Curiously, the authors of the JFK poster wrote ‘he is turning the sovereignty of the U.S. over to the communist controlled United Nations.’ It’s less fashionable than then to accuse people of communism, but in other respects the idea is the same.

All this is causing bells to jangle in my mind. Perhaps Ryan is a less extreme version of the men behind the ‘Treason’ poster, but his thinking’s very much the same. And I remember that Kennedy had the strength to stand by his position but also the strength to resist the siren calls of the hawks.

Just imagine if he hadn’t. The world might have seen the outbreak of a most disastrous war. And for what? Just over a quarter of a century later, the Soviet world collapsed anyway when the Berlin wall came down.

And look what happened when he didn’t resist hard enough: the US found itself embroiled in a long, bitter and bloody war in Vietnam which delivered his country its first defeat.

Today, in a world not much less dangerous than in 1962, I want more of the Kennedy who knew how to resist calls for military action over Cuba, less of the one who took the US deeper into the fighting in Indochina. And certainly nothing at all of the men who denounced him.

This evening Obama faces Romney for his second debate. Ryan has shown that his ticket belongs to the tainted tradition that in its time produced the ‘Treason’ poster. Obama has on more than one occasion shown the guts of a latter-day Kennedy.

I watched Obama in 2008 and he was inspirational. In his campaigning, he was already a worthy successor of JFK. But what happened at the last debate with Romney? Why didn’t Obama wipe the floor with him like Kennedy did with Nixon?

The Obama of 2008 didn’t show up then. He’d better be there tonight. Because I’ve known since I was ten that letting the other lot get anywhere near the levers of power is a recipe for catastrophe. For the US, of course; but for all the rest of us too.

In praise of childishness

I’ve not been able to track down the quotation, but I remember someone in David Cameron’s circle pointing out, at around the time of his election, that complaining about unfairness was something indulged in only by those who hadn’t outgrown childhood.

The line stuck in my mind because it seems to me to sum up an attitude that marks the political right around the world.

What flows from that attitude is often comic. For instance, when Mitt Romney wanted to prove his commitment to US industry, he pointed to the four American cars his family owns, including the ‘couple of Cadillacs’ driven by his wife – one on each coast, as it happens. Clearly the fact that those who struggle to fill a single car with fuel might feel it unfair that he has four luxury models, simply didn’t occur to him.

Often, however, the injustice is tragic. In Britain, the Romney lookalikes are in office and have turned their baleful attention to the poor. Not sparing, by the way, the ‘deserving poor’. It’s difficult to know just who is ‘deserving’ but one might imagine that people in hard but poorly-paid jobs might be included, though they’ve just had tax credits withdrawn from them.

Even more shameful is the denial of benefit to the sick and handicapped. The iconic figure of this onslaught is Karen Sherlock who died soon after discovering that she had been found fit for some work and her benefit would be cut off within months.

Her case is representative of the most vulnerable who are being sacrificed by a government that has granted those with incomes of over a million pounds a year, a £40,000 annual tax reduction. The reduction alone is sixty percent more than median average earnings across the country.

If it’s childish to find this kind of injustice insufferable, I’m proud never to have fully grown up.

There’s nothing new about any of this. I’m enjoying Marion Meade’s excellent biography of Dorothy Parker, wittily entitled Dorothy Parker. Meade gave the book a more inspiring subtitle, ‘what fresh hell is this?’, but that came from Parker’s way of answering the phone.

I’ve just discovered that in the summer of 1927, Parker was arrested in Boston protesting against the forthcoming execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. 

Sacco and Vanzetti:
powerful symbols of insufferable injustice

Now I don’t know the truth of the case: Sacco and Vanzetti were Italian immigrants to the States who were undoubtedly members of an anarchist organisation which took part in criminal activities, including bombings. Did they commit offences? They may have. Was either of them involved in murder they were charged with? Perhaps. Were they given justice? Absolutely not.

Michael Dukakis, as Massachusetts governor at the time, got it right in his proclamation to mark the fiftieth anniversary of their execution on 23 August 1977: ‘any disgrace should be forever removed from their names’. But he didn’t pardon them, which would have been to recognise their guilt, or declare them innocent, which he didn’t have the evidence to do. What he knew was that the trial had been mishandled from the outset, principally because the two defendants were assumed to be guilty by ‘right-thinking’ people including the trial judge.

When Parker was arrested, voices in the crowd called for her too to be hanged.

It only heightens my admiration for Parker that she chose to speak out against those voices, and more generally against those who deny the right of others to be treated as human beings deserving precisely the same treatment as anyone else.

Of course, being Parker she found an inimitable way of expressing her feelings about the people she found insufferable:

If I had a shiny gun,
I could have a world of fun
Speeding bullets through the brains
Of the folk who give me pains;

Or had I some poison gas,
I could make the moments pass
Bumping off a number of
People whom I do not love.

But I have no lethal weapon –
Thus does Fate our pleasure step on!
So they still are quick and well
Who should be, by rights, in hell.

Fortunately, these days, we have the most lethal weapon of all against the David Camerons and Mitt Romneys of this world: the ballot.

With the British opposition showing double-digit leads over the Cameron’s government, there are grounds for optimism that we can rid ourselves of it at the next elections in 2015.

Romney has yet to win office, so there’s still every chance of denying him in November this year.

It all depends on just how childish we can all contrive to be.

Dottie: antidote to the Camerons and Romneys

So you want to know what's going to happen in 2012?

As a public service, here are my predictions for the new year:

• There will be a lot more talk about the likelihood of the Euro failure. It will either fail or it won’t fail. The Eurozone will still be in crisis at the end of the year.


• The London Olympics will take place. Everyone responsible for organising them will describe them as an outstanding success. Everyone caught up in the jams in London will describe them as a major pain in the backside.


• Obama will be re-elected to the White House in November. Or he will be beaten by Mitt Romney. The US will still be in crisis at the end of the year.


• The ratings agencies will make a whole series of baseless judgements about different national economies. Because the people who make the markets will slavishly follow the ratings, they will all be proved accurate. Governments will continue to allow the agencies to dictate their policies.


• The Chinese will discover the hard way that ‘overheating’ really is a phenomenon and you can’t sustain unsustainable growth indefinitely. Or they will have another boom year and that painful but salutary lesson will be postponed again.


• Germany will win the European football championships. Or they won’t in which case one of the other teams will. It might be Spain but then again it might not.


• In other football-related news, a leading star, faced with his 25-year old supermodel showing her age, will make a fool of himself with a seventeen year old mesmerised by his figure - the athletic one he shows on field and bedroom or the one in his bank account. He will try and fail to block publication of the story. Eventually he’ll find it cheaper to pay off the teenager, who will make the easiest 300 grand of her life, and the wife will stand Tammy Wynette-like, by her man’s earning potential.


• The Queen will celebrate her diamond jubilee. It will all be jolly wonderful. People in countries round the world who take joy in poking fun at the British monarchy will be glued to their TV screens to enjoy the pageantry. 


• David Cameron will do all he can to take credit for the jubilee as he’ll have no other achievements to his name. He’ll get a three-point bounce in the polls.


• The pope will piss off the followers of one of the World’s great religions. It might be the Catholics.


• The Tea Party in the States will continue to delight us by achieving that ideal and elusive balance, sought by our best dramatist in some of their finest plays, between side-splitting caricature and and naked menace.


• Sticking with the States, the day of rapture will be announced, will be prepared for by believers and will pass without their leaders offering a word of apology or learning an ounce of humility.


• And on the ounce of humility front, starting in mid-December forecasters will tell us what’s going to happen in 2013 without the slightest mention of what they previously told us was going to happen in 2012.

Happy New Year!