With charity for all

At the end of 1862, in the wake the Union victory at the Battle of Antietam, Abraham Lincoln took a bloody and ugly Civil War to a far higher level – he issued the Emancipation Proclamation.  In bold and ringing words it was declared;

That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free...

I first heard this recited at the end of one episode of Ken Burn’s excellent TV documentary on the Civil War, contrasting images of brutalised slaves and black Union soldiers, all against a rousing chorus of The Battle Hymn of the Republic.  It was an emotional moment.

Emotional indeed.  The only thing is that the proclamation itself, for all its nobility, was a wartime executive order, one based purely on the authority of the President.  It was not the law of the land and - without the sanction of Congress - it had no abiding legal validity.  In other words, those slaves forever free might just as quickly have been back in chains if the war had been brought to a quick conclusion and the President’s authority challenged by the courts.  Emancipation Proclamation or not, slavery was still the law of the land.

It was the movie Lincoln that brought this simple truth home to me, one that I had previously overlooked.  I’ve always admired Stephen Spielberg as a director, one of the great masters of the cinematic medium.  In Lincoln he has surpassed himself, just as Daniel Day-Lewis has in his depiction of the sixteenth President of the United States, at once full of folksy wisdom and political shrewdness of an unparalleled order.  The screenplay by Tony Kushner is a commendable reduction of Doris Kearns Godwin’s monumental The Team of Rivals: the Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln down to manageable cinematic size.

Lincoln is not a biopic, not a log cabin to White House odyssey.  It is, rather, a bold focus on a narrow window of Lincoln's  political life – the attempt in January, 1865 to get the House of Representatives to pass a Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, already approved by the Senate, abolishing slavery altogether. 

This is real touch and go stuff; for the House has previously rejected the measure and the War is drawing to a close.  It’s quite conceivable that the struggle could have ended with the status quo ante bellum, settling nothing at all but the Southern States continuing membership of the Union. 

Even without the Southern representatives in Congress the matter is not clear cut.  Even within the President’s own Republican Party the matter is not clear cut.  The Radical Republicans, headed by Thaddeus Stevens – a scorching performance by a bewigged Tommy Lee Jones – believe in the equality of all.  But the Conservative Republicans, headed by Preston Blair (Hal Holbrook), are content to leave slavery in place, if only the war can be brought to an end. 

Sniping from the sidelines is the Democratic opposition, headed by George H. Pendleton (Pete McRobbie) and Fernando Wood (Lee Pace).  Many of them are Confederate sympathisers; some of them are outright racists.  But so, too, are many on the Republican side, which forces Stevens to hold his oratorical fire on the issue of equality of the races during one crucial debate, simply to ensure that the Amendment stands a chance of passing. 

Overseeing it all is the President, the consummate ringmaster, well able to resort to high-minded rhetoric, political intrigue and wheeler-dealing as the occasion demands, even if it demands paying off opponents with promises of office.  All the balls are in the air.  Not only does he have to manage his party, his cabinet and Congress, he also has to manage his wife!  Here we have another great performance, Sally Field as the highly strung and borderline crazy Mary Todd Lincoln.  The scene between her and Stevens, whom she hated, at a White House reception positively sparks! 

Lincoln is my sort of move, an intelligent, well-crafted and highly literate depiction of one of the great crossroads in American history.  Although the President, to gain the support of the Conservative Republicans, has had to invite a Southern peace delegation north, unbeknown to Secretary of State William H. Seward (David Strathairn), he does his best to make sure that little progress is made, either in travels or in talks.  The truth is - something I had not previously considered -, until such time as the Fourteenth Amendment is passed, for the President the war had to go on.

I don’t want to give you the impression that Lincoln is a high school history lesson; it’s not. Despite the narrowness of focus it’s as exciting a piece of political drama and intrigue as I have ever seen.  There are also some wonderful comic moments, particularly those involving a team of none too scrupulous lobbyists, headed by James Spader as William Bilbo, on a mission to approach wavering Democrats with offers they can’t refuse!   

I really can’t praise Day-Lewis’ performance too highly, a statement I suspect is in danger of turning into a cliché.  I will be amazed if he is not recognised at the forthcoming Academy Awards, but the Academy has a track record of amazing me.  This is Lincoln as I imagine Lincoln, full of unaffected charm and cracker barrel wisdom, backed up by shrewdness, by an intellect as sharp as flint and by a natural ability to read and manage people. 

It should also be stressed that both director and actor have done an excellent job in chipping away at the legend to give us a wholly plausible human being.  Lincoln does not walk on water; he is shown as a tough political operator, as canny as they come; Honest Abe at one moment, Machiavellian Abe at the next.  The actor carries the man to perfection, even in the quiet, unassuming tones of his voice, quite a leap, since nobody alive has ever heard the real voice!

To manage a war, to manage a government, to manage a cabinet, to manage Congress, to manage all of this and the pressures of domestic life is the task of a Titan.  Lincoln captures something of the scale and sweep here, the narrowness of focus notwithstanding.  Spielberg handles his subject with masterful ease, eschewing some of the showmanship that he is noted for in past movies.  Even when we fast forward to April 1865 the end comes not, as one might have expected, in Ford’s Theatre, but another theatre altogether, where a show attended by Lincoln’s youngest son Tad (Gulliver McGrath) is interrupted with news of the President’s assassination.

The movie finishes with a flash back to the second inaugural address, those wonderful words by a man who really did have malice towards none and charity for all.  At this point my tears are liberally flowing.  I had to wait until the end of the credits before risking a public appearance.   

A House Divided

I was amused to discover on Blog Catalogue last night that secession petitions are flooding into the White House in the wake of Barack Obama’s re-election to the presidency.  What, are we really back in 1860, is American on the threshold of a new Civil War?  No and yes, is my answer, a point to be clarified a bit later.

There they are, pleas flooding in from some of the same offenders: from Texas, from Alabama, from Georgia, from Louisiana, from South Carolina, from North Carolina, from Tennessee, from Arkansas and from Florida, all former members of the old Confederacy.  There are also petitions from Missouri and from Kentucky, states that at least had a presence on the Stars and Bars.

But – my goodness – there are also petitioners from the blue North, from Indiana, from Oregon, from Michigan, from Montana, from New Jersey and – would you believe it? – from New York!  So the Civil War solved nothing.  Secession is alive and well in American political consciousness!  Actually, it’s one of the great ironies of American history that the original thirteen states in casting off one imperial union bound themselves to another, far less mutable in every sense.

Anyway, Obama has only himself to blame.  Oh, I don’t mean in being re-elected, though that is the clear cause of an autumn of discontent among some Americans.  I mean he is at fault in agreeing to the White House’s We the People website, set up last year with the aim of allowing “all Americans a way to engage their government on issues that matter to them.” 

The promise is that if a petition from any given state reaches 25,000 signatures within thirty days the White House has to respond.  When I drafted this article yesterday evening Texas had already exceeded this threshold with 34,000 signatures.  Now it stands at 77,000.  I await Obama’s reaction with interest. 

Most of the petitions make reference to the words of Declaration of Independence;

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

…Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and institute new Government…

That from Texas is more specific, taking us to the real heart of the matter;

Given that the state of Texas maintains a balanced budget and is the 15th largest economy in the world, it is practically feasible for Texas to withdraw from the union, and to do so would protect its citizens' standard of living and re-secure their rights and liberties in accordance with the original ideas and beliefs of our founding fathers which are no longer being reflected by the federal government.

I think this is superbly put.  On the news sites I’ve looked at a lot of the responders are saying that the whole thing is racist, that there are lots of people, especially in the South, who simply do not like a black man in the White House.  I’m not saying that’s not true; it probably is in some cases, but I can see no evidence on the point.  This kind of observation looks more to me like an unthinking reflex: that criticism of Obama, any criticism, is almost racist by definition.  It’s a way of sidetracking the real and substantive issues over his imperial presidency. 

With Obama back there are genuine concerns, as the Texans make clear, over the future direction of the country.  It’s as well that people have an opportunity to make their views known, even if it’s only to challenge the darker angels of Obama’s nature.  He is hoist, so to say, with his own petard! 

Anyway, the real issue is about consensus, the real issue is about democracy itself.  In any normal electoral process the minority, small or large, bows out with reasonable grace, agreeing to abide by the outcome, recognising the government as their government, even if they did not vote for it.  In essence this is governing by consensus, a civil society bound together by a common understanding, a common set of values.  

The alternative, a highly dangerous state of affairs, is governing without consensus, where the minority feels alienated from the whole political process.  This was the state of affairs in Northern Ireland for decades. Now I'm not suggesting that the United States is any way similar to Northern Ireland, but fissures are appearing in the body politic which may very well have serious future consequences.  Many people increasingly begin to feel that the federal government no longer represents their interests, no longer reflects the principles upon which the nation stands.   

No, we are not back in 1860 but over the next four years a new kind of civil war may very well be fought. Obama clearly presides over a house divided, more divided than it has been in decades.  If anything his victory has compounded his problems.  His constituency is younger, poorer, browner, more blue collar and less self-reliant.  John O' Sullivan rightly notes in the Spectator, that this will inevitably lead to pressures for more regulation, more welfare, great government spending, higher taxes and more unionisation; it will lead to expectations that Obama, faced with a precipitous fiscal cliff, cannot meet, at least not without ruining an older and wealthier America, no matter its race or ethnicity.  Meanwhile America's creditors, particularly China, are looking on.

So, yes, the house is divided against itself.  Will it stand?  I honestly can't say.  But one thing I am certain of - Obama is no Lincoln.  

Mordred Bids Farewell to Camelot

This is an article I wrote for the Daily Telegraph readers’ blog in August 2009, following the death of Senator Edward Kennedy.  It appeared under the heading Sir Mordred Reflects on the End of Camelot.  I was reminded of it in discussion yesterday, when I said that if I were to choose a point in post-war American history where the country took a turn for the worse it would be the Kennedy presidency.  I stands here as my testament on a tawdry dynasty. 

So, Edward Kennedy is dead, the last of the political dynasty launched into the world by the money and ruthless ambition of Joseph P. Kennedy, one-time ambassador to Britain.  I’ve been looking over some of the obituaries, the usual unctuous stuff, the predictably tiresome tributes from people who probably couldn’t stand him in life, the same old same old these events occasion.  I personally feel no great sorry, how can I for a dynasty with such roots, a dynasty which promised everything and achieved nothing; a dynasty of hypocrites, openly self-righteous but morally tainted; tainted in the case of Edward himself with the shadows of Chappaquiddick.  Mordred now offers his own brief reflection of the fall and fall of the House of Kennedy.

Not much remains to be said about Ambassador Kennedy’s war-time record,  his defeatism, his attempts to reach an ‘understanding’ between the United States and Germany, his assertion that democracy in England was ‘finished’ at the point when RAF pilots were fighting and dying to prove him wrong.  I enjoyed Robert Harris’ thriller Fatherland, where he offers an alternate history, one where Joseph is president in 1960 not his son John.  In this President Joseph is set to come to Europe to conclude a treaty with the Fuehrer.  It may very well have been so; yes, it may.

 As for the actual President Kennedy, a paragon of liberalism in the way that his father was a paragon of Catholic authoritarianism, was any presidency more disastrous for the long-term interests of America?  What did he achieve?  Much, much that was to do America little good.  He escalated the Vietnam War without understanding what it was all about.  He offered support to the Cuban freedom-fighters hoping to overthrow the Castro tyranny, and then abandoned them in the Bay of Pigs.  It’s still not fully understood that the Cuban Missile Crisis of the following year, his ‘finest hour’, was a direct consequence of this weakness and this treachery.  The fiasco also considerably strengthened Cuban Communism, which continues to poison Latin America to this day.  And where Big Brother Jack led Little Brother Bobby followed, a petty bully in the garb of Attorney-General.  

So on to Ted, the last of the ‘great’ senators and the clan’s weakest link.  I suppose he deserves the accolade of greatness simply for being around long enough, the Methuselah of the upper house.  And what a variety of super liberal and semi-socialist causes he embraced, making lots of sound and fury in the process that signified nothing.  Was it enough to wipe away the shame of Chappaquiddick, the shame of leaving a nineteen-year-old woman to drown while he made his escape, the shame of failing to report the incident for hours after?  For some it seems to have been, for Super Obama it seems to have been, but not for Mordred; no, never. 

There is other evidence of Ted’s turpitude beyond Chappaquiddick.  The older Kennedys’ extra-marital exploits escaped press scrutiny a little in the same fashion as royals did at the time, but Ted lived long enough to see the emergence of a much less deferential age.  His exploits were a dream for his Republican opponents.  In 1988 in a speech on the Regan administration’s secret deal to sell arms to Iran he asked rhetorically “Where was George Bush?”  The reply was made on bumper stickers across the land, “Dry, Sober and Home with his Wife.”

Am I speaking ill of the dead?  I suppose I must be, but so much ill was directed at me by poets down the ages; so please allow me some return.  Even so, while I welcome no one’s death, I do welcome the end of a shabby modern Camelot, a tawdry illusion so much worse in every way than the original; an illusion that served to poison America with the lie of liberalism and the lie of socialism.  And now my time is gone. 

How Many Camels is Obama Worth?

Al-Shabaab, the Somali offshoot of al-Qaeda, has offered a bounty of ten camels to “whoever reveals the hideout of that idiot Obama.”  It’s their response to the US State Department's recent announcement of a reward of several million dollars for information on the whereabouts of the movement’s leadership. 

I wonder, perhaps, if the Somalis are being a little too generous in their assessment of the beleaguered President’s worth.  Ten camels seems excessive for a man who recently said that the American private sector was “doing fine”, an assessment, I would hazard, not quite in keeping with the experience of most people struggling with the economic realities of Obama World. 

I wonder also what ordinary Americans make of their president’s worth.  While pondering this deep question they may perhaps consider what they themselves are now worth after four less years.  Unfortunately I can’t give the depreciation in round camel figures but the dollar value is alarming enough.  The Federal Reserve report published at the end of last week shows that the net worth of a typical middle class American family has fallen from $126,400 in 2007 to $77,300 today.  I’m guessing that’s a heck of a lot of camels. 

The Dear Leader, struggling to turn attention away from the dire state of the debt-laden economy, says that America faces a straight choice between him and a return to the policies of George W Bush under Mitt Romney.  What would that involve exactly?  Why, spending trillions of dollars that the country does not have, open-ended, expensive and unwinnable foreign wars, an escalating economic downturn, slow job creation and ever more layoffs.  Wait a moment – I’ve just drawn a picture of the last four years.  Vote Obama and get Bush?  No, vote Obama and get Obama. 

The President’s negative campaigning calls to mind the concluding lines of Hilaire Belloc’s poem Jim.  Do you know it?  If not it goes like this – “And always keep a-hold of nurse for fear of finding something worse.”  Could things get any worse than they are at present?  It hardly seems possible. 

Just think about it, think about the last four years.  Obama’s attempts to stimulate the economy – more trillions in the black hole – stimulated next to nothing.  His health care reforms are of such prodigious complexity that they would even defy the intellect of Einstein.  He was awarded a peace prize for no peace.  His foreign policy initiatives have spluttered and died.  He has alienated Israel, America’s one true friend in a troubled region.  His Afghanistan campaign is creeping towards an ignoble end.  If that’s not bad enough I now understand that America has been covertly arming militants in Syria, seemingly blind to the fact that the Islamists among them have been involved in a murderous pogrom of local Christians. 

But it’s never Obama’s fault, oh no, it’s always somebody else.  His White House motto clearly has to be the buck stops anywhere but here.  Meanwhile on we go.  It’s never mind the economy, stupid - it’s legalising the residency of illegals; it’s gay marriage; it’s a kulturkampf with the Catholic Church; it’s all sorts of trendy liberal causes that are just so meaningful to Americans in the midst of their present presidential woes. 

Al-Shabaab should really devote those camels to better ends.  America, though, may feel it’s got the better of the deal.  

An Never Ending Story

Robert Caro, an American author, has not long published The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson.  It’s an exhaustive biography of the former president, but it’s also exhausting; for this is volume four and it’s not finished yet.  It may, in the end, take Caro longer to write the life than Johnson to live it.  For goodness sake, The Passage to Power just takes him over the threshold of the Whitehouse! 

I love biography, the more detailed the better but there seems to be a certain lack of authorial or editorial discipline here.  It’s now ten years since The Master of the Senate, the previous volume, was published and thirty since the project began.  According to an interview I read in Prospect, a political monthly, Caro “writes fast”; it’s the research that takes up the time.  He is to be commended for his thoroughness, but there are limits, even to the most meticulous research.  Is this, I ask myself, the real-life Book of Sand, a candidate for inclusion in Jorge Luis Borges Library of Babel? 

Writing in Prospect, Sam Tanenhaus says;

Caro is not prolific, but he is prodigious.  The books keep coming, heavy volumes, densely written and meticulously sourced.  The latest, at just over 700 pages, is of medium length for him.  It explores, or excavates, six years in Johnson’s life, 1958-1964 – covering his exit from the Senate, his miserable, deflating years as vice president, and his sudden elevation to the presidency, following the assassination of John F Kennedy.  During five of those years Johnson did, more or less, nothing.

What; does the author take 700 pages to tell us that his subject, more or less, did nothing?!  I’m beginning to feel a little guilty as I write.  I have no desire to talk down this work, a work that I have not read, a work that is unlikely ever to be surpassed, assuming its ever finished (my goodness, Vietnam, the Great Society, race, riots and rebellion are still to come!) but I simply could not resist passing comment on the observation about five years of, more or less, nothing! 

Even Tanenhaus, who clearly admires Caro for his industry, is aware of an inflationary tendency – “Had he written Waiting for Godot it would be longer than Wagner’s Ring, yet with its own idiosyncratic magnificence.”  Just imagine waiting for Godot for hour after hour after hour after hour.  There is only so much the human spirit can stand, even when there is idiosyncratic magnificence! 

Will I ever approach this monument?  Possibly not; there are too many other things to engage me and reading is for life, not life for reading.  Besides, I’m not sure I want to follow the Book of the Life of Johnson, at least in such detail, idiosyncratic magnificence or not.  There is a tragic quality to a man more controlled by events than controlling, a man who inherited a war and lost it; a man who launched massive welfare programmes which had a lasting and negative impact on American society.  But when it comes to tragedy I’m far more intrigued by Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon than Lyndon Johnson, the wheeler, dealer and failure from Texas.  

Obama’s Creeping Tyranny

I dedicate this article to Bob Mack and all other American patriots

I love America.  It’s like a second home to me.  We have close family friends in south-west Georgia, people I’ve been visiting on and off since I was a child.  They live in the old Georgia, semi-rural Georgia, a town surrounded by cotton fields, further from the chaos of Atlanta than mere distance would suggest.  It was in cotton fields in winter that I first learned to shoot.  Georgia and the Old South is all part of my romantic vision of the United States.

It's going with the wind.  Romance is shattered by reality, the reality of what is happening to America today, what is happening to American democracy and the American people.  On this side of the Pond we know all about creeping tyranny, as democracy is steadily eroded by the European Union, a bureaucratic monster that eats ever further into our individual lives.  We should have seen this coming.  Sadly we were betrayed by the lies and dissimulation of our politicians over many decades.  The betrayal of America has taken place over a far shorter period.  The betrayal of America is Obama.

Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote a classic study of American democracy in the nineteenth century, would no longer recognise the country.  I do not mean simply because so much has changed in two hundred years.  No, it’s at a more fundamental level.  His American Republic was based on overlapping communities, a plurality of interests, something which gave it meaning and strength, something that kept state and government at suitable distance.  Now the state, Obama state, is effectively crowding out the older forms of civil society, the older forms of liberty.  It’s the big battalions now, no longer Edmund Burke’s small platoons.

The whole process saddens me.  It saddens me that more Americans are not aware just how civil society and civil liberties have been eroded over the past four years by the most centralising government in the country’s history, a form of government that would once have been described as, well, un-American.  Even religious communities are threatened by the overweening power of the state.

My thoughts here were focused by a brilliant article by George Weigel in the latest issue of the political journal Prospect (Liberty, faith and Obama’s Leviathan).  Take the massive health care bill which Congress passed in 2010.  Did the senators and representatives actually read this document in its entirety?  Has anyone read its 2000 odd pages and lived?  No, probably not, but it’s a monster that has acquired a life of its own.  Its acquired a life in the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), where, as Weigel says, one finds Obama’s statist tendencies at the most refined.  Here the sacred flame of creeping state socialism is guarded with care. 

This self-serving bureaucracy is set to acquire power over so many aspects of American life, of the life of ordinary Americans, set to be strangled in red tape.  It’s staffed by people who represent the hard left of American politics.  These are the refugees from The West Wing, now enjoying unprecedented and vicarious power, like the bureaucrats in Europe.  They have a bigger agenda.  Weigel puts it thus;

For the regulators at HHS are not simply dedicated to the nationalisation of healthcare in the United States; they are committed to the use of federal regulatory power to promote and enforce their understanding of “preventative healthcare”, a euphemism that masks their commitment to the sexual revolution in its most extreme forms and their devotion to a virtually unrestricted abortion licence…Thus it seemed self-evidently clear o those drawing up plans for implementation of Obamacare that all employers be required to buy insurance plans that covered, not only contraceptives, but sterilisation and abortifacient drugs – all of which, to the permanent bureaucracy at HHS, are components of “preventative healthcare.”

Contraception here is not the issue.  Contraception is widely available in the States.  No, we are dealing with something more crucial; we are dealing with matters of conscience, conviction and religious principle.  Obama, in his lack of wisdom, has taken on the Catholic Church and other religious communities in a manner I would never have believed possible in the United States. 

It’s not about birth control; the Church is not trying to impose itself on anyone.  It’s about the use of coercive state power. It’s the insistence that the Church carry out procedures which conflict directly with its own teachings.  In essence it’s about religious freedom and freedom of conscience, an issue over which Obama and his HHS minions have little or no comprehension.  In Stalin’s Russia, when the church was not being persecuted, it was turned into a department of state.  In Obama’s America the Church is similarly set to be turned into a department of state. 

An administration blind to religious freedom is also blind to other forms of freedom. The state is filling so many areas of discourse.  The bureaucratic nightmare of Obamacare is creating, as Weigel indicates, a new Leviathan, the anti-pluralist form of rule identified in the seventeenth century by Thomas Hobbes.  Power is being centralised, dissent marginalised.  This is not a disease in isolation.  America has been infected by a European virus.  Here the left is intolerant of dissent and debate.  In American the left is equally intolerant of dissent and debate.  Public space, in other words, is being filled with state power.  American democracy is being consumed.  Leviathan has a huge appetite.  

It seems to me, that in this electoral year, that America stands on a crossroads almost as critical as that in 1860.  I can’t predict the future but the auspices are not good.  I could only wish for a more effective and persuasive opponent to Obama than Mitt Romney.  So much depends on opening the eyes and minds of the people to the dangers they face.  If you want a possible view of the American future look to the European present - big government, big bureaucracy and massive waste all against the diminishing of personal freedom.  It’s not a happy prospect.  I feel sure that De Tocqueville would be horrified by the land of Obama, the land of creeping tyranny. 

No Sale

I said in discussion recently that Barack Obama’s slogan for the coming Presidential election should be “No, I can’t”, a more honest and apt statement about him as a man, a leader and a chief executive than “Yes, we can.”

There was something else I said, that if a play is ever written about his time in the White House it really should be called The Death of a Salesman. It’s such a pity that it’s already been done. But I wasn’t actually thinking of Obama in the guise of Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman. It’s another salesman I had in mind – Samuel Bick from the movie The Assassination of Richard Nixon.

This is a movie about personal drift and decline that I saw last year on DVD, with Bick drifting in ever faster eddies, a yacht without a compass or a rudder. Bick is a salesman in a furniture store, not a very good one, diffident and lacking in self-assurance. His boss tries to motivate him in various ways, pointing to the then President Richard Nixon as an example of the perfect salesman. Why? Because in the Presidential election of 1968 he sold America the idea of ending the war in Vietnam and then failed to deliver. Nothing deterred, he sold exactly the same idea in 1972. Bick, in an increasing mood of despair, then takes Nixon as the avatar for all that is wrong in his life.

Obama is far more like Bick than Nixon. He tries so hard to be a salesman, tried to sell the idea that all that mattered was positive thinking. Time and again he has shown that it doesn’t. As his abysmal presidency, in so many ways the worst in American history, drifts from one nadir to another, he flails around, looking for scapegoats and excuses, looking for his own personal Richard Nixon, if I can put it like that, as an explanation for his failure

I noted from an article by Andrew Roberts in the political journal Standpoint that he is now is blaming the “millionaires and the billionaires” for blocking the recovery – i.e. tax hikes - , the kind of scapegoating that small people always resort to when in difficulty. But it’s the millionaires and the billionaires who have been taking up the reins that the state has allowed to drop.

The Committee to Encourage Corporate Philanthropy, a research body which monitors corporate giving trends, reporting from a database of 184 companies that corporate giving has increased by 53% since 2007, not at all bad in the midst of one of the most serious recessions since the 1930s. The total contributions across all respondents in cash and products amounts to more than $15.5billion. The biggest increase of all has been among companies working in the healthcare sector.

There are individuals like Mark Zuckerberg, Mr Facebook himself, who has contributed $100 million to create a better grading system in public schools. And then there is the financier Toby Forstman, who responded to America’s failing education system by setting up the Children’s Scholarship Fund, a programme that so far has provided scholarships to the value of $483million for thousands of low-income children to get into private schools. In foreign aid programmes the state now provides a mere 15%, the balance coming from private capital.

As Roberts says in his article, this is the ‘can do’ attitude that built America in the first place. Get the state out of the way, and then see what happens. This is yes, we can, in sharp contrast to Obama’s no, I can’t, and I never could. All he sells is hot air, big, windy meaningless speeches.

In 2008 many greeted Obama as a new Lincoln, the same grand words, the same lofty vision. In reality he has turned out to be more in the image of Franklin Pierce or James Buchanan. Yes, the fact that many of you probably now have to pop over to Wikipedia is a measure of how little trace they have left, a measure of their mediocrity. In generations to come other people, I suspect, will have to do the same for Obama.

Obama and the American Nightmare

In responding to a question on whether or not Barack Obama had shown great leadership I wrote as follows;

I think he is the worst, least competent, president in American history, an accolade I once awarded to James Buchanan but have since changed my mind. I think the buck stops everywhere but the Obama House. I think he shames the free world, which has long expected a lead from Washington, with his stunning incompetence. I think his capacity for high office is zero and counting downwards. I think he is a crypto-Marxist who has created a poisonous ideological atmosphere in the States, standing over a house divided almost as badly as it was on the eve of the Civil War. Do I think he has shown great leadership? Why, of course.

Taking out that final twist of irony that is exactly what I think. I could say that Obama was responsible for America’s present malaise, but he’s really too little a man for that, an individual of no real historic significance, beyond being the first black face in the White House. No, he is more of a symptom of a disease than the disease itself.

The nature of that, the nature of the disease and its pathology, I am really finding quite difficult to determine. But there is America, a crypto-Marxist as chief executive, an America whose business seems to be anything but business, an America where people can gather in one of the nation’s leading cities, decrying the very capitalism and enterprise which made it great in the first place. There, in New York, are the socially and politically suspect, playing at being Arabs, desperados in search of doles, the antithesis to everything that America represents, as bad, in their own way, as the communists and anarchists of the past.

At the end of his 1969 Silent Majority oration, Richard Nixon said of the war in Vietnam “Let us be united for peace. Let us also be united against defeat. Because let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.” Vietnam could not defeat America, the Soviet Union could not defeat America, Iraq could not defeat America, no power on earth could defeat this great country. Nixon was right: only Americans can do that; only Americans have done that.

I’m a historian; I like to draw parallels with the past. Every Empire declines, some more rapidly that others, but who would have believed that the American decline would have been so rapid. It’s just over twenty years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, which left the United States, Ronald Reagan at its head, as the preeminent power on the earth, the victor in the Cold War. It was the occasion for The End of History, Francis Fukuyama’s premature celebration of all that was good and true and noble.

Now here we are, here America is, in retreat across several fronts. It took Rome four hundred years to travel from the zenith of Augustus to the nadir of Honorius. It has taken America a mere twenty to go from the hopes of the age of Reagan to the mediocrity of the age of Obama.

Yes, Obama is a symptom; he’s not the cause, but his own weakness and incompetence has compounded the many problems confronting the nation. There is nothing inevitable here. The problems are bad but they are not intractable. The will and the vision are needed to overcome them; simple determination is needed, the ability to do what is necessary.

I take this point, this present time, to be the trough of American history. There is a way up but only when Obama is in the past, only when American can see this weak, incapable and fatuous man was the wrong choice at the wrong time. With a man like this history never provides a right time. Big, meaningless and windy speeches, head turning this way and then that, that’s the only trace that Barack Obama will leave behind, a silly and insincere voice in the depths of the American nightmare.

I hate Liberty

In discussion recently my attention was drawn to Thomas Jefferson’s Adam and Eve Letter, in which he extols the virtues of republicanism and liberty, specifically in relation to the events of the day in France, the unfolding Revolution. A particular passage was quoted, which proceeds as follows;

The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest, and was ever such a prize won with so little innocent blood? My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated.

The contest being referred to here is the constitutional struggles which saw the Jacobins emerge as the dominant political force. As I said in the original discussion, I am about to commit a cardinal sin, namely I am about to penetrate the semi-religious veneer which surrounds the American Founding Fathers, all the more outrageous because I am an Englishwoman, a Loyalist and a Royalist. So, if you find this shocking, please read no further!

To begin with I have to make it clear that Jefferson’s letter was written in January 1793, before the onset of the Reign of Terror, before the Jacobins had revealed themselves in all their horror as some of the worst political thugs in history, by far the most murderous exponents of ‘liberty’ that France or any other nation has ever experienced. Still, January 1793 was the month that Louis XVI was done to death, a sign of things to come. Putting that to one side, there are other issues, broader issues specifically concerned with Jefferson and ‘liberty’ that deserve closer examination.

Jefferson was obviously a craftsman, a craftsman in words, in grand and noble words, sentiments robbed of practical meaning. Rather than see ‘liberty’ fail he would have seen half the earth desolated. Did he have the first clue, I have to ask, over the precise meaning of this word? What a pity it s he did not stay in Europe to see half of France and then half of Europe desolated in the cause of ‘liberty.’

Take one example. When the people of the Vendée in the west of France, a peasant community wedded to their traditional Catholic faith, rose against the excesses of ‘liberty’ in early 1794 they were treated with such inhuman savagery that there have been moves to have the repression – which embraced the wholesale massacre of men, women and children – declared an act of genocide. This is hardly surprising when one reads the report that General Francois Joseph Westermann sent to the Committee of Public Safety in Paris;

There is no more Vendée... According to the orders that you gave me, I crushed the children under the feet of the horses, massacred the women who, at least for these, will not give birth to any more brigands. I do not have a prisoner to reproach me. I have exterminated all.

Clearly Jefferson can’t be blamed for this. I have not the least doubt that he would have been horrified by this ‘desolation’, by this particular definition of ‘liberty.’ So, yes, it’s possible to excuse him. What is not possible to excuse is his personal hypocrisy, hypocrisy that allowed him to laud grand abstractions like ‘liberty’ while keeping black people in servitude.

Oh, I’m fully aware of his sentiments on the evils of slavery but that only seems to compound his offence. I know all of the additional platitudes he mouthed; but it did nothing to stop him relying on servitude, freeing only two of the hundreds of human beings who were his personal property. Dr Samuel Johnson in Taxation no Tyranny, his 1775 answer to the addresses and resolutions of the American Congress, posed one central and uncomfortable question: "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" There is really no answer to that.

I can only take so much hypocrisy, so many empty platitudes advancing 'liberty' where there is no liberty. But I shall withdraw, a Tory, a Royalist and a Loyalist, a hater of 'Liberty' and leave the last word to an American;

Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except Negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics." When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

Midnight President

There is no justice; life is just so unfair. I know that, you know that, but sometimes it frustrates me so, looking at things from a historical perspective. I wrote recently about Richard Nixon, a man I consider to be one of the most intelligent presidents that America has ever had, inspirational and imaginative. Yet his presidency was systematically destroyed on the flimsiest basis of all.

Now, I turn to Bill Clinton, one of the worst, a man who degraded the office – literally – of president, a chief executive tainted by moral depravity, a proven liar who still managed to survive two full terms in office. He’s a Democrat and I generally find Democrats no more appealing than the British Labour Party, but as a representative of this socialist party he represents the nadir, worse even that that priapic hypocrite JFK, and that really is something.

He’s now pushing on a bit; I guess I should try to be a little more charitable to ex-President Clinton, who, in his dotage, has taken to remembering the good old times in Times Square, remembering just how ‘romantic’ it was before New York’s most famous thoroughfare was cleaned up.

Those where the days alright, the days of Clinton’s youth, the days of pimps, hookers and druggies; a fascinating time. There he was up from Arkansas, a kind of political version of the Midnight Cowboy, watching as a prostitute approached a man in a grey flannel suit, loving the downbeat seediness of it all.

Seediness, yes, that was the leitmotiv of the whole Clinton presidency, a man who turned the Oval Office into his own version of Times Square, a place of blue dresses and stains, a place where he did not have sex with that woman, another insight into this man’s topsy-turvy world. It’s such a pity that he did not invite Dustin Hoffman to join his administration, just to complete the picture, in the guise of Enrico “Ratso” Rizzo, of course, perhaps as Secretary of State.

I shall finish with a Clinton joke, one told to me by a good friend of mine from Georgia. It goes like this:-

Hilary –sadly – has died and gone to heaven. There she is in Saint Peter’s office, the man at his desk. Behind him, reaching out to infinity are clocks, clocks and clocks.

“What are they for?”, she asks.

“Well, Saint Peter replies, “for every human soul there is a clock, set at twelve noon at birth. The hands only ever move if a person tells a lie. See, here is Mother Teresa’s, still at twelve; she’s never told a lie in her life. There is George Washington’s, standing at five after; he’s hardly ever told a lie.”

“Where’s Bill’s clock?,” she asks.

“Oh, that’s in Jesus' office; he’s using it as a fan.”

The man who never quit

I recently said in discussion that Richard Nixon was a great and troubled man whose story could only have been written by Shakespeare. I am certainly no Shakespeare, so you need not expect The Tragedy of King Richard I any time soon! But I admire Nixon as a man and as a politician, along with Ronald Reagan the most outstanding president, in my estimation, of the post-war years.

Are you surprised? How can anyone admire Tricky Dickey, Watergate man, the only president to be forced out of office under threat of impeachment? It can’t be denied there is a lot to deplore in aspects of his career, something of the night, something of Caesare Borgia in a character which often verged on the unscrupulous. In the end, as he himself admitted, he let his country down. Still, he was a man of outstanding intellect and ability, a man of vision and imagination, a man courageous enough to make the bold moves, the moves that make history; a man who rose and fell and rose again, time after time.

Who would have believed that Nixon, who made an early reputation as a red baiter, would be the president to normalise relations with Mao’s China? Because of this he now stands in the same pantheon as Don Giovanni and Falstaff, the only chief executive ever to have inspired an opera!

There is indeed something of the Shakespearean prototype about him - a tragic hero, flawed as all such figures are, flawed in such a way that brought about his own downfall. Consider, though, what he achieved in the area of foreign policy alone, not just opening relations with China but at the same time managing a balancing act with the Soviet Union, which included an important strategic arms limitation treaty, the first major thaw in the Cold War.

He brought American involvement in the war in South-East Asia to an end, though it was to lead to the extinction of the Republic of Vietnam two years later, something he said would not have happened if he had remained in office. It was certainly through his prompt action that Israel was able to recover from its early reverses in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

There is also much in his domestic programme to admire, the way in which he was able to bring America back from the economic and social chaos of the latter part of the Johnson presidency, the closest, perhaps, the country came to tearing itself apart since the early 1860s. In the end it was all for nothing; all for Watergate, that stupid, unnecessary burglary, followed by an even more stupid and inept cover-up that saw the Nixon presidency die by slow and humiliating degrees.

Yes, it would need someone with the talent of Shakespeare to capture the full irony of Nixon’s fate, but Oliver Stone made a credible attempt in Nixon, the 1995 biopic starring Anthony Hopkins. Here we see the man, a life beset with uncertainty and paranoia, with feelings of rejection, but always, always that drive that was to take him from a log cabin, well, a California grocery store, to the Whitehouse. The climb was hard, the fall harder – “To be outdone by a third rate burglary is a fate of biblical proportions.” It is indeed.

What followed was the presidency reduced to its nadir, through the Ford and Carter years, only recovering with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. By this time Nixon had also made his own recovery, showing, even in retirement, that he had lost none of the drive that had taken him so far in life. As a writer and elder statesman he was to gain many new admirers. His television interview with David Frost, the subject of Frost Nixon, a wholly engrossing movie, became the most watched encounter of its kind in broadcast history.

Iago, Hamlet, Macbeth – Nixon managed to combine elements of all three in his own complex and flawed personality. “A man is not finished when he is defeated. He is finished when he quits”, he once said. Nixon never quit. Is there any better accolade, any better obituary?

Little Big Man

Today happens to be the hundredth anniversary of one of the outstanding political figures of American history, arguably the greatest president of the previous century – Ronald Reagan, born on February 6, 1911 in Tampico, Illinois.

As a political operator my preference is for Richard Nixon, the Cesare Borgia of the While House. But there is no denying that, despite his many achievements, he was one of the most divisive figures ever to attain senior office. Reagan may not have had the intellect or the guile of Nixon, but he was the man for the times, a decent, uncomplicated man, one who helped cure the wounds left over from Watergate and Vietnam.

What a contrast he is compared with the present incumbent of the White House. He came to office in 1981 with none of the political advantages of Barack Obama. The Democrats controlled the House and the Republicans had the slimmest of majorities in the Senate. The economy was in bad shape, the worst since the 1930s, with an unemployment rate of 7% and inflation running in to double figures. In the international sphere the Soviet Union was looking more dangerous than it had for some time past. Things could not really get much worse.

Now fast forward to 1989, two terms completed. The economy was buoyant and communism, the whole of the Evil Empire, in a state of collapse. Retiring to Bel Air, Reagan left behind him an approval rating of 64%, the highest of any departing president since FDR.

There is so much to account for this, simple things going beyond success in foreign and domestic policies. He had the kind of charisma and charm that is so obviously beyond Obama, little more than a deflating gas bag, issuing windy rhetoric and nothing besides. Reagan had a quality of sincerity and moral decency, just the thing that America needed after the nadir of the presidency in the aftermath of Watergate, followed by the fumbling incompetence of the Carter years. He gave the country a new sense of direction, a renewed belief in itself. Nothing was impossible, he said; ordinary people can achieve so much by themselves if only government gets out of the way, the only message one wants to hear from a politician; the only message I ever want to hear.

Folksy, straight-talking, down to earth, he was everyman, the little guy who became a giant, for once proving that the American dream is not always an illusion. A natural actor, his greatest role was as the 40th President of the United States, a performance for which he deserved an Oscar.

Long Live the King

It is, I think, one of history’s acutest ironies that revolutions almost invariably produce the opposite from the aim intended, or, rather, they take existing evils and magnify them still further. Take the puritan rebellion in the 1640s which led to the outbreak of the English Civil War. Here the intention of those who supported the Parliamentary side was to limit the powers of the King. After considerable bloodshed, which embraced the judicial murder of Charles I, Oliver Cromwell, in the office of Lord Protector, had tyrannical powers bestowed on himself that the King could never have imagined possible.

But it’s another example I’m thinking of – that of the American Wars of Independence or the American Revolution, as it is sometimes described. This was directed against the ‘tyrannical’ powers of George III, a milder ruler than even Charles I. But after the victory what then happened; did America achieve a new birth of republican freedom? Actually, no; if anything it was a new birth of monarchy.

When George Washington –George IV, perhaps? –assumed the office of president in 1787 he was given personal powers far in excess of those enjoyed by George III. Not only could he appoint ministers but his remit also extended to ambassadors, consuls, administrative officers and Supreme Court judges. As Commander-in-Chief he could go to war, make treaties and conduct foreign policy all independent of Congress.

So, there you have it; the outcome of the Revolutionary War was that Americans swapped a hereditary monarch with limited powers for an elective monarchy with powers not even subject to their own legislature. Hannah Griffiths, a Quaker from Pennsylvania, expressed her disappointment in verse;

The glorious forth – again appears
The day of days – the year of years
The sum of sad disasters.
When the mighty gains we see
With all their boasted liberty
Is only change of masters.

It was because of this that America, in the following century, was to revisit some of the constitutional struggles that had been fought out in England centuries before. One of the leading political parties before the Civil War took the name ‘Whigs’, challenging the executive power of ‘King’ Andrew Jackson, calling to mind the politics of the reign of Charles II. The Civil War, at least to some degree, was a second American Revolution, with the Confederacy representing the spirit of 1776, the spirit of local opposition to central control. Guess what? The King won. :-)

Barack Obama-a Term Report

It’s not been a super year for Super Obama, that sheep in sheep’s clothing. The Sermon on the Mount rhetoric continues, but he is now beyond the stage where you can fool all of the people some of the time. Seemingly his approval rating is now lower at this stage in office, his first anniversary, than any president since Eisenhower.

Is there really any surprise in this? It was possible to predict this rather dismal outcome from those big, vacuous campaign speeches, promising all things to all people. There was never any lie; Obama genuinely believed in what he was saying, I would certainly give him that much, which makes the offence all the greater. Politics is not about ‘vision’; politics is about reality, and the self-deluding Obama was never more than a fantasist. Now reality kicks in. He promised a change when he was inaugurated last January. There has certainly been change, and all for the worst.

It’s a dismal picture. Unemployment is rising, house prices continue to fall, Guantanamo is still open and the war in Afghanistan is getting steadily more Vietnam-like and less popular by the day. It makes no difference if he wins peace prizes for no peace, the fairy-tale is over. The thing is America and the world, a good part of the world, was seduced by the Obama myth, the myth of the first black man in the White House. Here was Moses pointing a finger to the Promised Land; here was a man who would bring Americans together. But this was not Moses, it was not even Aaron; it was just, well, Barack Obama, just another Democrat, just another politician. He was deluded, America was deluded, the world was deluded.

Yes, the wind is still there, so, too, is big government and higher taxation, forms of creeping socialism that Obama does have to his credit. But as for bringing Americans together he has gone so far in the opposite direction that I cannot think of a chief executive who ever had a more divisive effect, and I’m not excluding George W. Bush! I read a report from one electoral county in Kentucky, a mining district, solidly blue collared; the sort of district that would elect Charles Manson before it would elect a Republican. Now, according to local people, even Charles Manson as a Republican could beat Barack Obama.

Year one has been bad; year two, I predict, will be even worse.

The Not the George W Bush Prize

I have little time for President Obama politically. Still, I can recognise that he is a clever man, a good speaker and a public figure with a warming personality. I also thought that he had a certain degree of tactical skill. The acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize proves that he has none.

Just think: how much greater he would have looked if he had declined, if he had simply thanked the committee for its generosity but said that the goals set out have still to be achieved. But he could not, because this unexpected and quixotic decision by the Nobel people came at the end of a bad period for Super Obama, capped by a humiliating personal snub by the International Olympic Committee.

I now have a deeper understanding than ever of Obama: he is no more than a celebrity president for a celebrity age, an age where style and image have triumphed over substance and results. Having failed in Copenhagen he bounced back in Oslo. As far as the X factor stakes go he is still up there with a chance.

Now a word or two about the Nobel Committee. My first reaction on hearing the announcement-after thinking it must be a spoof- was that it says nothing at all about President Obama, nothing about his achievements, and heaps about them, about the obvious political bias of these people and, I would add, their desperate attempts at political correctness. It seems obvious to me that Obama is being awarded less for what he is and more for what he is not; he is not a Republican; he is not George W Bush.

Look back on the history of this absurd prize, to whom it was given and, just as important, to whom it was not. Did you know, for example, that Ghandi was nominated five times but never recognised? Those who were recognised included such doves of peace as Henry Kissinger, Yasser Arafat and Menachem Begin. And now Obama joins their company, still at the outset not at the end of his career. From this point forward he has the burden of being a peace laureate who most likely will have to take his country ever deeper into war. On the domestic stage he raised expectations that he has been unable to meet. Now on the world stage impossible expectations have been thrust upon him. Who, but a fool, would accept the role of Messiah for a day?

So, there he stands, with one disappointment laid hard upon another. He is dithering over Afghanistan while Americans die; his health reform programme slips and slips; Guantanamo Bay is still open in the face of all of the liberal hopes; he has provoked a quarrel between the politicians and the generals; he looks less and less plausible. And in the midst of all this, all the domestic and foreign problems, he and Michelle had the time to slip over to Copenhagen to put their weight behind Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics, yet another failure, another sign that ‘Obama power’ does not work.

But cast down in one Scandinavian capital he was raised up in another, a form of personal compensation. He did not get the Olympics but at least he got ‘Peace.’ I rather suspect that the celebrity President has not the wit to understand that he did not get peace either, that he is unlikely ever to get peace. It’s the triumph of pious hopes over solid achievements.

Unconditional Folly

Unconditional Surrender, the declaration that the enemy powers had to lay down arms without condition or concession, was President Roosevelt's idea which he announced to the world at the end of the Casablanca Conference, on an entirely unilateral basis. For the sake of Allied unity, it was immediately endorsed by Winston Churchill, though he later admitted to being dumfounded by the announcement, and worried by its likely effect on the future course of the war.

Dwight D Eisenhower, also present at the conference, shared Churchill's misgivings, believing that such an uncompromising line would only serve to prolong the war, costing more Allied lives than was necessary. In fact, there would appear to have been few, if any, who welcomed Roosevelt's declaration of intent

It also dismayed people like Admiral Canaris and others in the German resistance, but-not surprisingly-delighted Josef Goebbels, who said "I should never have been able to think up so rousing a slogan. If our enemy tells us, we won't deal with you, our only aim is to destroy you, how can any German, whether he likes it or not, do anything but fight on with all his strength." It is surely no coincidence that the Propaganda Minister's infamous Total War Speech came a few weeks of the Casablanca edict-Now, people rise up and let the storm break loose.

Perhaps the absolutely worst thing about unconditional surrender is that it came just as the German army had suffered one of the worst defeats in its history at Stalingrad, considerably weakening the prospects for the Reich, and making it more likely that the senior command would listen to the blandishments of Canaris and others. But now they had to fight on, Nazi and anti-Nazi alike.

In the summer of 1943, with Italy on the point of abandoning the Axis, Churchill and Eisenhower's attempts to negotiate a compromise peace with Pietro Badoglio were ruined after Roosevelt held fast to unconditional surrender. In the delays that followed the Germans were able to pour troops into Italy, ensuring that Allied progress up the peninsula would be slow and painful.

Similarly, as D Day approached in 1944, George Marshall and the US joint chiefs urged Roosevelt to moderate his policy, but met with outright refusal. Even after German resistance in Normandy proved far tougher than expected Roosevelt refused to budge, despite a further appeal from Eisenhower. He defended his policy on a visit to Hawaii-when he confirmed it also applied to Japan-, drawing an example from American history, insisting that this is how U. S. Grant had dealt Robert E Lee at Appomattox in April 1865. But, of course, it was not, as those of you familiar with the history of the American Civil War will be only too well aware. Grant offered Lee and the defeated southern army terms, and very generous terms at that.

In the end the policy, though not completely discarded, was moderated after Roosevelt's death. While the Japanese surrender was declared to be 'unconditional', they were permitted to keep their Emperor. If they had not, while one cannot be absolutely certain, it is possible that America's nuclear bluff would have been called, making an invasion of the Home Islands necessary. The cost in lives of such an endeavour can only be imagined.

Time for another Tea Party!

I have a keen interest in American constitutional history. I’ve read some of The Federalist Papers, the more important documents among them, and know how fascinating they are, how the Founding Fathers grappled with some of the great issues of politics and governance that faced the new nation. The arguments forwarded by James Madison in favour of checks and balances are of enduring relevance.

The essential point is that Americans, supposedly having overthrown one ‘tyrant’ in the form of George III, were reaching for a way of ensuring that a republican tyranny did not rise in its place; that a new monarchy, in other words, did not arise from the office of President. But, my, my, how Madison, Jefferson and Franklin would be shocked to see how that office has both expanded…and degenerated.

In 1776 George III’s power, the power held by the English monarchy as an institution, was in steady decline, devolving by degrees to Parliament and the office of Prime Minister, a process that would continue throughout the nineteenth century. Now, by way of contrast, look at America, look how the country’s political institutions have evolved since the Revolution. There the Constitution has in theory and practice enshrined monarchical power, enshrined, if you like, the monarchy of 1776. Now, I ask, is there any greater paradox or irony than that?

Let me deal with some specifics. The Presidency has become monstrous, a reflection both of the times and the office. In the nineteenth century the American Whig Party was formed to challenge what they perceived as the growing autocracy of ‘King’ Andrew Jackson, recalling the struggles of the seventeenth century English Whigs against the absolutism of the Stuarts. My, how far things have gone since then. A King, a mere King? Why, that’s far too modest. Super Obama has gone that one step further, at least he has according to Newsweek, which described him as “…above the country, above the world; he’s sort of God.”

Alas, I shall ever be the prophet unarmed, a Cassandra in the wilderness but I love America, a kind of second home for me, so I will say it: Super Obama is going to let you down and let you down badly; he is not God; he is not even a King, though he has all the power of one: he is all promise and no substance. There is nothing behind the repellent personality cult that has been woven around this wooden titan. But Newsweek says he is God, and I rather suspect Obama thinks he is God as well. Look at those big divine promises: he is going to overhaul health care; he is going to create millions of jobs, he is going to cure cancer; he is going to rid the world of nuclear weapons and so on and so on and so on. The Promised Land is there before you, is it not? The problem is that it flows not with milk and honey but with empty words and windy rhetoric.

Still, the expansion of executive power is real enough, threatening to invade areas that even FDR dared not touch. I do not think you will end up any better off, and I do not think that Super Obama will ever be able to make good on his ludicrously inflated promises; but there are still genuine dangers to your liberty, dangers that the Founding Fathers would have been acutely aware of. The danger is not in Obama himself; he is just the fool who paves the path to hell with good intentions. The danger comes from behind, from the populism that pushes him forward in his divine mission, the populism uncorked by his demagoguery.

Hey, guys, it’s time for another tea party.

Frost Nixon

I went to see the Frost Nixon movie earlier this year. Have you seen it? Well, I simply can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s not as sweepingly effective as Oliver Stone’s Nixon, but, given the limitations of the structure-a screenplay based on a series of interviews between David Frost and ex-president Richard Nixon-it works terribly well. Essentially if follows a standard Hollywood format, with the ‘good guy’ reeling under the blows of the ‘baddie’, until he finally gets up and delivers a knock-out punch.

The key moment in the whole movie is set during the last of the interviews, that dealing with Watergate, when Nixon effectively says that the President has powers above and beyond the law, the leitmotiv of tyrants throughout history. Michael Sheen is good as David Frost, but not nearly as good as Frank Langella as Richard Nixon. Langella, I suppose, amplifies aspects of Nixon’s character that Anthony Hopkins showed in Stone’s move: the inner vulnerability, the sense of rejection and self-loathing, the great Achilles Heel of a man who in many ways was one of the most intelligent American presidents of the last century.