Quote of the Day (Stephen L. Carter, on the Difference Between Honesty and Integrity)

“The first point to understand about the difference between honesty and integrity is that a person may be entirely honest without ever engaging in the hard work of discernment that integrity requires: she may tell us quite truthfully what she believes without ever taking the time to figure out whether what she believes is good and right and true. The problem may be as simple as someone's foolishly saying something that hurts a friend's feelings; a few moments of thought would have revealed the likelihood of the hurt and the lack of necessity for the comment. Or the problem may be more complex, as when a man who was raised from birth in a society that preaches racism states his belief in one race's inferiority as a fact, without ever really considering that perhaps this deeply held view is wrong. Certainly the racist is being honest—he is telling us what he actually thinks—but his honesty does not add up to integrity.”— Yale Univ. law professor, legal- and social-policy writer, columnist, and best-selling novelist Stephen L. Carter, “The Insufficiency of Honesty,” The Atlantic Monthly, February 1996

In this last election, many voters mistook rudeness for candor. Events of the last four years have demonstrated the magnitude of this mistake—a confusion in perception that could have been avoided if Stephen L. Carter’s distinction of a quarter-century ago had been kept in mind.

But with all due respect to this incisive thinker, I don’t think that this exhausts all that can be said about the word “integrity.” Many supporters of the now-departing White House regime were right to find Hillary Clinton—and, to a significantly greater extent, husband Bill—deficient in integrity.

It all goes back to the Latin root of the word, integer, meaning “whole” or “complete.” Even more than perpetrating a series of unnecessary lies and incomplete versions of the truth, “Billary” had, in their determination to “compartmentalize” their private personas from their public duties, presented one vision of themselves in opposition to another.

In one sense, their detractors in the electorate understandably wanted an end to the couple’s artifice and broken personas. Where they went wrong was failing to ponder in the Republican candidate four years ago the lack of mental and moral hard work needed for integrity cited by Carter—and in failing to calculate how multitudinous and malignant that opponent’s deceptions were compared with Ms. Clinton.

(The image of Stephen L. Carter accompanying this post was taken at the 2015 Library of Congress National Book Festival, Sept. 5, 2015, by fourandsixty.)

Essay: Female Politicians in the #TimesUp Era—The Obstacles Continue

“Women have a harder time than men establishing their credibility as candidates, because our traditional images of political leadership are male (along with our traditional images of trial lawyers and neurosurgeons)….Men are presumed to be competent; women must prove they're competent…. Voters want candidates who will fight for them, but women who present themselves as fighters are likely to be considered strident, at best, or bitchy…. In addition to these general credibility problems (which seem to be lessening), women candidates also cite particular, familiar manifestations of bias. They commonly complain that the press pays too much attention to a woman's appearance. Josie Heath, a 1990 and 1992 Democratic senatorial candidate from Colorado, notes that she can describe her wardrobe by reading her campaign clips.”— Wendy Kaminer, “Crashing the Locker Room,” The Atlantic Monthly, July 1992

“It is harder to be a public woman in America than a public man, and harder to be a female candidate. The challenges they face are practical, emotional, even existential. Practical: No one gets a lot of lot of sleep on the trail, but a woman has to get up an hour earlier for makeup, hair, to choose what to wear and get it together. If she doesn't, they'll say she looks bad. Emotional: We are a crueler country every year, thanks in part to the internet, where women are the objects not of more hate but of sicker hate—brute, sexual, anonymous. Existential: people often experience what a woman says and what a man says differently. They just do.”—Peggy Noonan, “The Odd Way We Announce for President Now,” The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 19-20, 2019

With her symbolically chosen announcement on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, U.S. Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) (pictured) joins three other female candidates—Elizabeth Warren, Kristen Gillibrand and Tulsi Gabbard—in the race for the Democratic nomination for President. Wouldn’t it be something if one of the quartet, nearly a century after women gained the right to vote, finally broke through the biggest glass ceiling of all?

Don’t bet on it. 

I know what you’re thinking: More than a quarter-century after the prematurely proclaimed “Year of the Woman” of 1992, women are set to make their presence felt on Capitol Hill in unprecedented numbers. Following the 2018 midterm elections, more than 100 women will, for the first time, serve in the House of Representatives, with 131 in both chambers of Congress. The incoming class is sizable enough to have rated a recent 16-page special supplement in The New York Times.

But female politicians at the national level still unconscionably lag badly behind their male counterparts: Not simply in the lack of progress relative to other countries that have had female heads of government (notably, Great Britain, Israel, and Germany), but also as a percentage of seats held in the House of Representatives (only about a fourth).  

More dismaying, I couldn’t help noting in coming across the articles by Wendy Kaminer and Peggy Noonan, is the hard-core persistence of image problems afflicting female candidates. It’s a point in common, over the span of 27 years, between Kaminer, a liberal lawyer (even a longtime ACLU member) and critic, and Noonan, a conservative speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. 

James Carville once famously defined politics as “show business for ugly people,” but women seem oddly exempt from that in the current political environment. They are not allowed to be physically flawed at all.

If Women of a Certain Age on the political stage elect not to have plastic surgery, they are said to look old. If they do have plastic surgery, they are said to look suspiciously young-looking. Let it be noted that most of the people doing most of this “saying” are Men of a Certain Age that are probably more in need of cosmetic enhancement themselves.

It’s as if the prejudices these men recite remain obdurate, even encrusted, even as times and people have changed—or are supposed to have done so, at least.

Just how ingrained these instincts might be can be seen in the 2016 Presidential election. In the run-up to the bitter and baffling finale between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, a close relative of mine said that Mrs. Clinton, unlike Trump, looked tired. The same could not be said for her rival, my relative said.

This type of observation might be forgotten now, with the former Democratic nominee having made enough appearances in the midterms with her husband that many in her party heartily wished that the couple would just go away.
 

But in 2016, it was very much a live issue, with Trump suggesting that Mrs. Clinton had “low energy” and lacked “the mental and physical stamina to take on ISIS, and all the many adversaries we face.”

In vain did I argue with my relative that Trump may have looked so fresh because he didn’t bother to stay up reading position papers and that he traveled on his own jet with every conceivable creature comfort. In contrast, Mrs. Clinton had maintained a punishing schedule as Secretary of State. 

But my relative’s speculations coincided, unhappily, with Mrs. Clinton’s appearance at a 9/11 memorial commemoration in 2016 in which she had to be walked away after feeling sick. The subsequent pneumonia diagnosis seemed to confirm to those already not well-disposed toward her not only that, as Trump charged, she had “low energy,” but even to the more gullible members of the electorate (the kind that read The National Enquirer and Alex Jones) that she had an advanced case of Parkinson’s Disease. (Funny how all that talk has dissipated nearly 2½ years later, isn’t it?)

Coming as it did after such slash-and-burn tactics, Mrs. Clinton’s loss that fall was bound to gall her female supporters anyway. But the fact that she lost to someone who, right on camera, admitted to groping women—i.e., sexual assault—also seems to have fed much of the fury of the #MeToo movement. 

Rather than “draining the swamp” in Washington, as promised during the campaign, President Trump had actually only given greater prominence to one of the most reptilian creatures in our nation’s capital: The Washington Male. The late political commentator, war correspondent, and editor Michael Kelly memorably defined the species in a December 1996 column for The New Republic:

“The Washington Male is the reason so many Washington females have that drawn, pained expression all the time. It comes from having dinner with Washington Males….There’s no kidding about it, either: The Washington Male has absolutely and profoundly no sense of humor.”

His pep-rallies out in the American Heartland to the contrary, the President is far more acclimated to Washington than he has ever let on. In his unending humorlessness, he has found common cause with the Washington Male. 

More important, because he is constitutionally incapable of taking a joke, he perceives threats everywhere and will take action against the slightest threat to his authority—a bellicose personality in permanent danger of creating a crisis, not to mention a leader ready to crush all opposition to those who regard him as a grave threat to the Constitution.

Yet his base ignores all of this, just as they blithely ignore the very things in Donald Trump—low energy, visible signs of aging—for which they attack female politicians, usually on social media.

One of the women subject to such carping over the last several years has been Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Not content to label her a “San Francisco Democrat” of leftist orientation, conservatives have also made the 78-year-old politico a convenient target for ageism.

I can’t say I’m a fan of many of her policies, but I definitely have to tip my hat to the lady now. This past week, she managed to do what 16 rivals in the GOP primaries (15 of them male), Sen. Mitch McConnell, and Ms. Pelosi’s predecessor as Speaker, Paul Ryan, never managed to do: Bring the tantrum-throwing Twitterer in Chief to heel.

“Women candidates have stories to tell different from men's,” writes Ms. Kaminer, “because, like it or not, they represent to voters different visions of authority and different values.” The temptation, after the results of last fall, is to believe that, for an electorate desperate to wipe the slate of American politics clean, that may be women candidates’ greatest advantage.

 

But Ms. Pelosi presents a more realistic possibility. Along with the instinct that any Speaker must have—a sense of how many votes are on hand for a bill—Ms. Pelosi demonstrated, in the recent protracted government shutdown, a keen ability to play upon the tender male ego—in this case, a male ego who couldn’t abide the idea of not using Congress as a backdrop for his State of the Union message. Ms. Pelosi attributed Trump’s forcing of the government shutdown over the border wall with Mexico—and his stubborn, even childish resistance to a compromise on it—to a “manhood thing.”

As of now, Trump’s “manhood” is undergoing what Seinfeld’s hapless George Costanza called “shrinkage.” Female candidates, please take note: Playing upon such anxieties among male opponents may be your best road map to success.

Quote of the Day (Charles Peters, on Hillary Clinton’s ‘Smug Certainty of Her Own Virtue’)

“What scares me the most is Hillary’s smug certainty of her own virtue as she has become greedy and how typical that is of so many chic liberals who seem unaware of their own greed. They don’t really face the complicity of what’s happened to the world, how selfish we’ve become and the horrible damage of screwing the workers and causing this resentment that the Republicans found a way of tapping into.”—Former Washington Monthly editor Charles Peters quoted in Maureen Dowd, “Curtains for the Clintons,” The New York Times, Dec. 2, 2018

Charles Peters, let it be said right away, is no Trump supporter. But he’s in as good a position as anyone to understand why Hillary Clinton lost the support of the working class that had been a bulwark of the Democrats going back at least to the New Deal.

Now in his 90s, Peters was a county campaign chairman in his native West Virginia for John F. Kennedy in the 1960 Presidential election. Since 2000, he has watched in dismay and horror every four years as this once reliably Democratic state has given its wholehearted allegiance to the GOP.

Years from now, historians will be utterly perplexed over why Hillary Clinton, so obviously better qualified for the Presidency than her opponent—and part of an administration with a favorable record on the economic and national-security issues that matter to voters—could have lost to Donald Trump. Perplexed, that is, unless they understand the smugness that Peters correctly identifies as infuriating to the working class.

How could anyone question her good faith, Ms. Clinton wonders, even as she and her husband took in $240 million over a 15-year period speaking to all manner of industry groups and foreign countries who sensed—correctly—that she would be gearing up for a third Clinton term in the Oval Office. Her tone-deafness in making three speeches to Goldman Sachs totaling $675,000—and then refusing to divulge the transcripts of the addresses (which ended up out there anyway, courtesy of WikiLeaks)—is remarkable.

But then, it is hardly less remarkable than a Democratic Party that helped pass NAFTA under Clinton’s husband—an agreement that, it is plain to see now, did nowhere near enough to protect American workers from production jobs being moved to Mexico, not to mention lowering wages and benefits here at home, according to an analysis five years ago by the Economic Policy Institute.

In the 1936 election, even amid the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt fulminated against the “economic royalists” of Wall Street, and won in a landslide. In 2016, a more brazen “economic royalist” than FDR could ever have dreamed of won the Presidency, in no small part because of the very real faults that so many in the working class detected in Ms. Clinton.

Power is as addictive as any opioid, a condition demonstrated once again by Ms. Clinton’s unwillingness to disclaim any more attempts at the Oval Office. For Trump to be defeated in 2020—and Trumpism to be removed from the American body politic thereafter—Clinton needs to be repudiated by the Democrats, along with the corporate coziness that led the party to look away as the 1% put workers’ livelihoods and lives at risk, then escaped the jail time they so richly deserved for causing the Crash of ’08.

The Trump ‘Brand,’ Part 3: Deceiver

In my first post on Trump as a “brand,” I discussed how Donald Trump’s campaign and persona have involved 4 D’s: deadbeat, deceiver, demagogue, and danger. My second post related to this attempted to comprehensively cover his career as a deadbeat and what that might portend for his leadership of our economy. With precious little time left in this election, I thought I would devote this post entirely, in detail, to his career as a deceiver.

This year, the GOP nominated a candidate who, by virtue of intellect, training and temperament, is completely unqualified for the Presidency. One has to ask how this came to pass. In no small part, the answer lies in the nominee’s capacity to hoodwink large portions of the public about his background and beliefs.

Some trace the source of Trump’s initial popularity with GOP primary voters to his lack of caution or a filter—his “lack of political correctness,” they’ll say. That is an entirely too generous an assessment of his personality, however.

In Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, Cary Grant’s ad man noted that in his profession, there were no lies, only “expedient exaggeration.” Trump took this notion—and, typically, galloped away with it—in The Art of the Deal:

“The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.

“I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration -- and a very effective form of promotion,” he added.

“Truthful hyperbole” makes rather rich Trump’s claim that Hillary Clinton “lies all the time.” I write this with no love lost for either her or her priapic husband. (For proof, see this prior of mine, “The Clinton Playbook: Bipartisan Survival in the Sex-Scandal Age.”)

But Trump’s falsehoods have been so broad and brazen that Politifact had to put them in a whole category of its own. It couldn’t award him a single “Lie of the Year,” so it had to assign a whole group to it.

In a remarkable six-page editorial urging America to “Bury Trump in a Landslide,” The New York Daily News was not engaging in the slightest hyperbole when it referred to him as “the most extraordinary, if not pathological, liar ever to seek the Presidency.”

Trump's Own "Birther" Problem

Among his lies that proved central to his unlikely candidacy for the Oval Office were his dark insinuations about Barack Obama. He not only stage-managed “birtherism’s” movement from the political margins to a constant issue dogging the President, but also hinted that Obama might not be releasing his Columbia University transcript because it would prove that he had been admitted to the school on the basis of affirmative action.

But Trump has an “origins” story far darker—marked by persistent obfuscation, the influence exerted by the very rich, and lying—than the President he so relentlessly criticized. If Barack Obama Sr. figures hugely in the paranoid nightmare of members of the Alt-Right, then Fred Trump plays an even more central role in the murky tale of his son’s beginnings.

In a section of his 1987 bestseller, The Art of the Deal, detailing his family history, Trump observed that his grandfather “came from Sweden as a child.” The only problem is that the real-estate mogul is no more Swedish than I am. (For the record, I’m of Irish descent on both sides of my family.)

For the record, Friedrich Trump — Donald’s grandfather —came not from Sweden, but from Kallstadt, a small town near the German border with France. After emigrating to the U.S. at the turn of the century, he tried to go home, but the authorities’ reminder of his military-service obligation sent him back to the U.S. again, this time for good.

More than 30 years later, Friedrich’s son Fred—now selling homes, with a large base consisting of returning WWII veterans—began to peddle the story that he was the son of a Swedish immigrant. What would have led him to make that claim?

Some have implied that he was trying not to excite zenophobes who blamed American involvement in two world wars on German aggression. But there may well have been more to it than that.

A June 1, 1927 article in The New York Times reported that Fred Trump had been among individuals arrested after a "near-riot" involving 100 policemen and 1,000 Klansmen in Jamaica, Queens, at a "Memorial parade." This was not a case of mistaken identity, as the address listed was one not only linked to Fred (21 at the time) on Census records but where he lived for much of his adult life.

The article is ambiguous about the extent of Fred’s involvement, if any; it notes that Fred had been discharged, so it is possible that he was an innocent bystander. 

But by the late 1940s, he would not have been eager for the war vets (many Jewish) he was trying to attract to his housing connect him to a racist, anti-Semitic organization. A claimed Swedish ancestry, on the other hand, would have thrown people off the scent. Just to make sure it stayed that way, Fred backed Israeli bonds, according to a Michael Daly article earlier this year in The Daily Beast.

The family inclination for fabulous tales, then, passed from Friedrich to Fred to Donald. The grandson’s mounted as high as his Manhattan real estate. 

'First in His Class'? Really?

Although Trump’s promotion of the birther lie about Obama has gotten more attention, the tycoon’s hit-and-run insinuations about the President’s attendance at Columbia University may be more hypocritical.

Even before he implied that affirmative action might have been behind Obama’s successful transfer from Occidental College to Columbia, he hinted, even more outrageously, that the President might not have attended at all, because none of Obama’s classmates could even remember him from those years!

That line of attack is typical of Trump’s method: first try one line of attack, then, if that doesn’t fly, try another. Even if that second one doesn’t work, it would be like a plate of food hurled against the wall: even if it bounced off, it would leave a mess afterward. 

His hints about Obama’s collegiate career had its intended effect on that portion of the Republican base who could never bring themselves to believe that an African-American had achieved enough—or even possessed enough intelligence for—to attend not just one, but two (Columbia, Harvard Law School) Ivy League institutions.

Trump’s own path through academe poses a good deal more questions than Obama’s, though. He, too, transferred to an Ivy League school—in this case, from Fordham University to the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. For anyone who claims he at least was not admitted to this selective institution because of affirmative action, they might want to keep in mind that it likely came through an even surer means: family influence.

I don’t mean simply Fred Trump—whose wealth alone, to be sure, might have smoothed the path for Donald. No, I’m talking about Fred Jr., Donald’s brother, who was friendly with an admissions officer at the school, according to Trump biographer Gwenda Blair.

What was he like once he got into the school?

 In 1973, he told a reporter from The New York Times that he had graduated first in his class at Wharton. (It would not be the only lie he would tell journalists that year: he also decried the discrimination lawsuit against his father then as “ridiculous.”)

There was only one problem with this, and knowing Trump, you’ve probably guessed it already: the likelihood that it was true was close to zero. An article in The Daily Pennsylvanian from 1968 did not list him among 56 people who made the Dean's List at Wharton in 1967-68, nor did any of his classmates recall him being valedictorian or even especially academically accomplished. 

These last few anecdotes collectively tell a story: By the time Trump was making his way into the business world, he was already lying. These were not lies to protect himself or someone he loved because of a mistake, but lies to puff himself up, to see his name in the paper again and again. What he learned was that it would take such a long time for someone to catch up with the lie that by that time he’d be in another situation requiring a different, larger fraud.

The Alternate-Reality Candidate: A Partial Checklist

We should have known that someday, Trump would become a reality-show star. It’s not only because such shows are fake and manipulative, but because they involve the creation of an alternate reality—most notably, the construction of a persona, dependent on an audience without memory of his ceaseless chameleon changes. 

And so, in this campaign, we have a Republican nominee for President who:

*Nearly 14 years ago, wisecracked that Paula Jones’ problem was that she didn’t run away fast enough from Bill Clinton—but who, before his second debate with Hillary, held a press conference featuring Jones and other women who had accused the former President of improprieties;

*A decade ago, knowing all the accusations against Bill Clinton, nevertheless invited him and his wife to his third wedding—but who now hits out at them for mistreating women;

*Claims that no man respects women more than he does—but was forced to apologize after being caught on tape bragging about grabbing women’s private parts;

*Claimed a couple of times, in 2015 and 2016, that he didn’t “know anything” about David Duke after the Ku Klux Klaner endorsed him—even though he had previously denounced him twice, a decade apart;

* Says that the “real” current unemployment rate could be as high as 42%, conveniently forgetting the fact that unemployment in the Great Depression—generally regarded as the worst economic crisis in American history—peaked at only 25% in 1933;

*Said in 2003 that he would probably support the American invasion of Iraq (“Yeah, I guess so”), only to deny doing so today—even though he is shown on videotape doing so;

*Said that Clinton’s approach to borders meant that she “wants to let people just pour in; you could have 650 million people pour in and we do nothing about it,” ignoring the inconvenient facts that, as Associated Press reporters Calvin Woodward and Jim Drinkard note, “every other country in the Americas, from Mexico south to Chile’s southern tip, and a chunk of Canada would have to empty its entire population into the U.S.”;

*Until six years ago, he supported various gun-control measures, only to go all-in with the National Rifle Association now;

* Tweeted during the primaries that rival Ted Cruz’s father may have been involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy;

* Claimed falsely that the 9/11 terrorists' friends, family, girlfriends in the United States "were sent back for the most part to Saudi Arabia. They knew what was going on. They went home, and they wanted to watch their boyfriends on television";

*Impersonated a publicist in order to brag about himself in the early 1990s, only to deny doing so during the primaries (and, of course, lashed out at the Today show for bringing it up)—even though he admitted as much to People Magazine two decades ago.

A Habit of Hiding the Truth

Part and parcel of Trump’s deceit has been not simply his continuous, unashamed lying, but his penchant for concealing the truth. That has meant destruction of documents required in court cases (on a scale that dwarfs Hillary Clinton’s problems with e-mail); suing opponents of his projects; threatening libel suits against media outlets; and inciting crowds at rallies and his Twitter followers against individual reporters (after the candidate lashed out at her, NBC reporter Katy Tur required Secret Service protection to shield her against Trump supporters).

In fact, Trump has shown far greater solicitude toward the ambiguous Second Amendment than he has toward the very clear First Amendment. While he has gone all-in with the National Rifle Association, his proposal for banning Muslims amounts to a religious test for entering the country; his vow to make it easier to sue for libel amounts to a shield against inquiries into his own activities; and his threat to pursue anti-trust litigation against Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos represents blatant vindictiveness against a newspaper that has published some of the reports most damaging to his candidacy (e.g., David Fahrenthold’s stories about Trump not donating all the money he’d claimed to have made to charities, and about the groping tape). 

I could go on and on like this. The beauty of such a list is that it’s interactive: Trump has generated so many falsehoods, on a daily basis, that readers can readily add to this compilation.

Sometimes, in the course of this long campaign, I have despaired about writing this series on Trump in what has been called a “post-factual” environment. Too many people (and that includes those of the left as well as the right) remain so wedded to their ideology that they are impervious to any challenge to it.

But to accept this state of affairs is to throw up one’s hands about the possibility of the effective mass persuasion needed for democracy. Moreover, it means abandoning the need for accountability toward all who seek public office. That way lies a danger almost as significant as the Trump candidacy itself with its war on truth.