Posted on 02/19/2016 9:33:47 PM PST by joanie-f
Debate Performance Cannot Overshadow Decades of Personal History
One of the aspects of the current campaign climate that I find deeply discouraging is the fact that the majority of the American electorate spends little or no time learning about the candidates in the weeks and months leading up to the primaries, and they apparently spend little or no time during non-election years paying attention to the roles that American politicians, and would-be candidates, play in events and policymaking that are happening both in America and elsewhere around the globe.
One of the shocking and disturbing ramifications of that sad state of affairs is that, for example, in the twenty-four hours leading up to the recent New Hampshire primary, a full 50+ percent of republican and independent voters had not yet decided for whom they were going to cast their ballots.
Every remaining candidate in the republican race has a resume consisting of decades of revealing statements and actions that define his or her character, integrity, accomplishments, honesty, positions on public policy, and the depth and consistency of all of the above. Yet the citizenry either has so little knowledge of those essential prerequisites, or so little interest in them, that a single 'poor performance' in a single public debate can often threaten to derail a candidate's hope of claiming the nomination. And a 'poor performance' can be defined as anything as superficial as appearing tired, or too argumentative, or too repetitive, or not sufficiently charismatic, or simply making a single misstatement.
Let's take the example of Ted Cruz. (Disclaimer: I am an ardent Ted Cruz supporter, thus the choice of him as my example. If you would like the example at hand to be another candidate, then write your own essay.)
Flippant sarcasm aside, let's look at just a very cursory summary of Cruz's resume:
Ted Cruz graduated cum laude, with a B.A. in Public Policy, from Princeton. While there, he won many prestigious national debate awards. He then attended Harvard Law School, graduating magna cum laude with a J.D. degree. He was an editor of the Harvard Law Review and executive editor of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. While at Harvard he received many awards and accolades, including being dubbed by Professor Alan Dershowitz (certainly no fan of conservative politics), 'off the charts brilliant.'
He served as a law clerk for Chief Justice William Rehnquist, after which he accepted a position with a private law firm, and in that position was instrumental in drafting legal arguments for presentation before both the Florida and U.S. Supreme Courts.
Some of Cruz's public career assignments included serving as a director of the Federal Trade Commission, as associate Deputy Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice, as domestic policy advisor to President George W. Bush during the 2000 campaign, as Solicitor General of Texas, and as Chairman or Vice Chairman of the following U.S. Senate committees: Commerce Subcommittee on Space, Science and Competitiveness, Judiciary Committee on Oversight, Federal Rights and Agency Activities, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
During his service as Solicitor General of Texas, he argued before the U.S. Supreme Court nine times, winning five of those cases. He has authored seventy U.S. Supreme Court briefs and argued forty-three times before the courts, nine of those times before the Supreme Court. He has appeared in that capacity before the Supreme Court more than any other member of congress has.
In academia, he served as an adjunct law professor, teaching Supreme Court legislation, at the University of Texas.
Cruz's legal credentials and accomplishments have been lauded by many, and he has been recognized for his efforts by having been named one of the fifty best litigators under the age of forty-five in America, one of the fifty most influential minority lawyers in America, and one of the twenty-five greatest Texas lawyers of the past quarter century.
Since his election to the senate in 2012, Cruz has sponsored no fewer than twenty-five of his own bills on issues ranging from the repeal of Obamacare to reforming campaign finance regulations.
Whether or not one agrees with Ted Cruz's conservative credentials, the above abbreviated resume is the kind of information that any informed voter should have at his or her disposal, not only regarding Ted Cruz, but regarding all viable candidates for the presidency of the United States. I happen to believe that Cruz's resume is stellar, especially as compared to most others seeking to become the leader of the free world. Other citizens may hold a different opinion, but each of us needs to know precisely what each candidate has accomplished in his or her adult life, by what means he or she has achieved those accomplishments, and whether his or her vision for America is consistent with that record of behaviors and accomplishments.
My question is, how many potential voters, in both the primary and general elections, know any of the above about Senator Cruz? How many potential voters have researched and are aware of at least a similarly cursory resume about each of the other candidates? If the answer to both questions is 'very few,' then relatively meaningless things such as two-hour debates, and thirty-second sound-bite political advertisements, develop the dangerous power to become inordinately more influential than they have any right to be in a free republic.
I ask all of you, when you watch the next debate, to take note of your positive or negative reactions to each of the candidates. Then expend the time and energy required to research and delve into that candidate's decades of genuine personal history. Then ask yourself whether that positive or negative reaction to a possibly offhand comment made in a single evening meshes well with what you have learned about that candidate's history. If it does not, then chalk your debate impression up to the fact that that candidate had an especially good, or an especially bad, day. We all have them. Do not allow a one-minute glowing promise, or a one-minute slip of the tongue, or a few drops of perspiration, to eclipse a lifetime of achievements, or a lack thereof.
Equally importantly, if you see a political advertisement that claims that a candidate did something that would be deemed distasteful to most voters, research that claim. If you discover it to be a lie or a blatant exaggeration, allow that to reflect on the person making the claim rather than on the person being criticized. If you discover it to be a true representation, add that representation to your own personal research.
More than a decade before America was even formed as a free republic, John Adams wrote, 'I must judge for myself, but how can I judge, how can any man judge, unless his mind has been opened and enlarged by reading? A man who can read will find ... rules and observations that will enlarge his range of thought and enable him the better to judge who has and who has not that integrity of heart and that compass of knowledge and understanding which form the statesman.'
I strongly suspect that neither Adams nor any of the other Founders would today consider the watching of a few debates, or a few political advertisements, the kind of vigilant research that will provide the American electorate with sufficient evidence to judge who has and has not that integrity of heart and that compass of knowledge to become the leader of the free world at this watershed time in the history of both our nation and the world. I pray that the average American voter shows a willingness to expend the necessary time and energy, over the next few months, so that debates and political advertisements will serve as only one or two of many tools they use in their evaluation of the genuine character, integrity, accomplishments and vision of each potential candidate. Our Founders would ask no less, and our republic's very existence depends on it.
Max Boot, the neoconservative Russian import.
If anyone shares Mussolini’s love for getting involved in wars it’s Max Boot and his democracy project pals.
Like most of the neocon faction Boot promotes American military intervention for the purpose of remaking the world.
He was all for Clinton’s Balkan’s adventure. He urged Dubya to invade Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein. He supported Obama’s Libyan campaign.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/article/1626
P.S. to my last, Aquamarine:
Just to be crystal clear: I want you to know that I started out as an enthusiastic supporter of Ted Cruz, as any review of my past posts would make plain.
But I was totally shocked, stunned by the shenanigans perpetrated against Ben Carson in Iowa by the Cruz campaign, and a number of like incidents subsequent to that.
Cruz claimed he knew nothing about these things -- plausible deniability at work. Then he finally apologized to Dr. Carson (while still maintaining he "knew nothing" about the incident -- Sgt. Schultz at his best); but the damage had already been done. It may be he eked out his narrow victory in the caucus because of the manifest falsehood, advanced by his campaign, that Dr. Carson had withdrawn from the race.
To me, incidents like this are nothing but dirty tricks; and only a crooked man, a dishonest man, would perpetrate them, or be a party to them, or a beneficiary of them.
Such a man is not fit to be President of the United States. Period.
Subsequently, I have found a fit description for Senator Cruz: He is a SOPHIST.
Sophist, noun:IMHO, this definition fits Ted Cruz to a tee; and I am simply disgusted with him.
a paid teacher of philosophy and rhetoric in ancient Greece, associated in popular thought with moral skepticism and specious reasoning; a person who reasons with clever but fallacious arguments.
He reminds me of the character Callicles (a vicious, conniving, ambitious man), in Plato's dialogue, The Gorgias. Callicles' argued that "might = right." He was the champion of moral relativism. In the dialogue, Socrates destroys this argument, and makes Callicles look like the FOOL he is.
So Callicles, out of revenge and sheer spite, colludes with a couple of buddies, and gets Socrates charged on a baseless allegation of "corrupting the youth of Athens," a crime for which Socrates was convicted and for which he received the death penalty....
The trial of Socrates is the story told in Plato's Apology....
I don't much care for Callicles -- nor Ted Cruz, who seems to resemble him to my mind.
Aquamarine, as Heraclitus said, "Character is destiny." I daresay Cruz is a man of bad character....
JMHO FWIW
Donald Trump has left behind him decades of broken promises, lies, vicious personal attacks on people who have done nothing more egregious than disagree with him, and monumental changes of heart/mind regarding his political allegiances. I referred to four (of many) such examples in my recent Patriot Post commentary, posted here just yesterday.
Yet, after being made aware of such characterless behaviors, spanning decades, rather than stepping back and analyzing such behaviors, many of his supporters instead either (1) choose to point to a single incident possibly committed by one of his political opponents, and/or (2) completely ignore, or denigrate without factual support, the evidence being presented against Trump's character.
I, and others, will be checking back here in late summer, once Trump has garnered the republican nomination, after which the media will be releasing a destructive version of the dogs of war such as we have never seen, 'conveniently' exposing the underside of every one of Trump's personal and business 'deals', after which the democrat nominee (whomever that will be, avowed socialist, or covert socialist/felon) will simply waltz into the White House and complete Mr. Obama's 'transformation of America'.
The most tragic aspect of that entirely choreographed scenario will be that there was a Reagan-esque leader who valiantly sought to prevent our republic's demise, and the American electorate turned their backs on him, according vocal and unyielding preference to a snake oil salesman who promised them what they wanted to hear, but whose promises were not worth the breath it took to utter them.
Do you mean Carson?
I know that I'm not going to change your mind nor are you going to change mine. We have both judged these men's character and drawn different conclusions.
That is the fact.
But I do agree with you, dear Joanie, about one thing: It is probably pointless for us to continue going back and forth on this.
Well, not exactly, dear Sister in Christ.
I'm convinced -- gut feel if you will -- that one of the main reasons Carson stays in the race is to get back at Cruz. His Christian conservative support would gravitate to Cruz as much or more as to anyone else.
I think that's what the 'broom closet' meeting was all about.
Ted hadn't thought about someone taking it personally.
Agreed. Once he has the nomination in hand, the media (who no doubt have been amassing a mountain of 'dirt' on him) will time-release that mountain of evidence that he is not fit to be president, and, if the FBI and the DOJ have not honored their Constitutional commitment before then, the socialist felon will most likely win in a landslide.
The choreography (and it really is quite impressive in its behind-the-scenes intricacies) is unprecedented.
Very interesting insight, dear Brother xzins. It certainly makes sense.
Methinks Ted is toast. So is Rubio for that matter. Super Tuesday should tell the tale.... I've already voted, in Massachusetts. I'm recovering from a hip injury, so requested an absentee ballot, which I've already voted and returned. March 1st will be a late night for me!
There was an amazingly enlightening essay in today's edition of The New York Post, by Peggy Noonan. Now Peggy is no spear carrier for The Donald, to be sure. But I daresay she sees the "big picture" of this presidential election better than anyone else I've read thus far.
Here's an excerpt:
...I got to thinking of how Donald Trump got to be the very likely Republican nominee. There are many answers and reasons, but my thoughts keep revolving around the idea of protection....Man, can that girl write!!!
There are the protected and the unprotected. The protected make public policy. The unprotected live in it. The unprotected are starting to push back, powerfully.
The protected are the accomplished, the secure, the successful -- those who have power or access to it. They are protected from much of the roughness of the world. More to the point, they are protected from the world they have created. Again, they make public policy and have for some time....
They are figures in government, politics, and media. They live in nice neighborhoods, their kids go to good schools, they've got some money. All of these things tend to isolate them, or provide buffers. Some of them -- in Washington it is important officials in the executive branch or on the Hill; in Brussels, significant figures in the European Union -- literally have their own security details.
Because they are protected they feel they can do pretty much anything, impose any reality. They're insulated from many of the effects of their own decisions.
One issue obviously roiling the U.S. and western Europe is immigration. It is THE issue of the moment, a real and concrete one but also a symbolic one: It stands for the distance between governments and their citizens.
It is of course the issue that made Donald Trump....
In wise governments the top is attentive to the realities of the lives of normal people, and careful about their anxieties. That's more or less how America used to be. Now it seems the attitude of the top half is: You're on your own. Get with the program, little racist.
Social philosophers are always saying the underclass must re-moralize. Maybe it is the overclass that must remoralize.
I don't know if the protected see how serious this moment is, or their role in it.
Meanwhile, we have a kind of bidding war going on between would-be presidential candidates, regarding who has the best programs and policy prescriptions. As if we Americans are buying a new car, and so are comparing the features of various models to find the one we think "best."
To me, in this political year, that sort of thing is entirely beside the point.
I think Peggy Noonan is calling things just right. I certainly agree with her analysis. I care ever so much more about Joe Sixpack, who clings to his guns and his Bible, than I do the arrogant, elite ideologues and mover-and-shaker politicians and pundit class who are irresponsibly ruining our country.
And so does Donald Trump.
JMHO, FWIW
Thanks ever so much, dear brother in Christ, for your insights about that "meeting in the broom closet."
Thanks, Betty. It is a great article by noonan. The elite, aka the protected, are almost nietzche’s idea of ubermensche, aren’t they? Or fancy themselves such.
I can’t believe that Super Tuesday is just the day after tomorrow. Holy cow.
Indeed, dear brother in Christ. Methinks these types are going to have a devil of a time on Judgment Day. Though I do not know the details of how God judges, I suspect He will find their arrogance, vanity and heartlessness unforgivable.
I'm glad to leave this issue to Him.
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