‘Golden Age’? How About ‘Gilded Age II’?

Humorist Calvin Trillin, taking note of the fashionably attired friends of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, referred to the festivities surrounding the 1981 Presidential inauguration as “The Night of the Minks.”

Considering the attendees who helped Donald Trump plan his attempted coup four years ago, allowed him to escape legal and political punishment for it, or financed his return to the Oval Office, the parties after this week’s transfer of power might have been termed “The Night of the Finks.”

Viewers were informed, at noon on Monday, that “a golden age for America begins right now.”

Well, the newly inaugurated President got the letter “g” right in the key word in that sentence, but that’s about it. The correct word was “Gilded.”

You might recall “The Gilded Age” as the title of an HBO series about the filthy rich in New York following the Civil War. It took its name from an 1873 novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner that satirized greed, political corruption, and conspicuous consumption in that period.

Alas, the book’s subtitle has a lasting significance that its collaborators could never have imagined: “A Tale of Today.”

Much like our time, the innovations in technology and finance introduced 150 years ago gave rise to fortunes of staggering proportions and equally vast inequality. The possessors of these riches, memorably dubbed “robber barons,” were—and are—not shy about crushing union and safety activism, buying legislators, and subverting attempts to regulate their businesses even while flaunting their wealth and influence.

Taking note of the assembly of the well-heeled on hand after the oath of office—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault, Alphabet Inc. co-founder Sergey Brin, and Apple CEO Tim Cook—one person on LinkedIn hailed “businesses and government [that] run their companies or departments like sports teams who put the best on the field.”

So much depends on the eye of the beholder. He saw business all-stars; I saw successors to the 1933 Weimar businessmen determined but unable to control the twitchy guy who’d taken over their country.

Some of them proceeded cheerfully, others nervously, but all optimistically to congratulate a fellow billionaire who, unlike most of them, was born into wealth, then saved by his father from falling off several financial cliffs in the early 1990s.

If they felt any jealousy over his inherited fortune, they gave no sign of it as they greeted the newly sworn-in President and recently convicted felon. It was more important that he help them maintain their privileged perch—the tax cut that has disproportionately benefited them, the government regulations from which they beg relief.

What they all share is, in the apt phrase of The Atlantic’s Franklin Foer, “a playbook for exploiting public office for private gain.”

Somehow, they all managed to stifle their guffaws over the new President’s hobbyhorse about renaming the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf of America.” Maybe they didn’t realize that the true “Gulf of America” was what now separated them from the poorest, most desperate citizens of their country.

They wouldn’t have found that out from the wall-to-wall, breathless media coverage surrounding the inaugural, which did not constitute political journalism or even fashion reporting so much as plutography—an obscene depiction of the lifestyles of the rich and famous.

Stepping to the front of the line to make the most of their relationship with Trump have been Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk, until recently the co-heads of the President-elect’s new Department of Government Efficiency—an advisory commission that, Musk blithely assured the public in November, could find $2 trillion in federal spending cuts.

With Musk more recently suggesting that $1 trillion might be more feasible, that hope didn’t make it to the inauguration.

Neither, as it happened, did Ramaswamy, the biotech and finance entrepreneur who auditioned as Trump’s most shameless Mini-Me in the GOP primaries, a candidate utterly unable to articulate a single point of difference with the eventual nominee.

Late last week, having already royally ticked off transition team members with his arrogance, Ramaswamy gave his rapidly growing army of enemies the only weapon they needed with his X post on H 1-B visas. Tech companies, he claimed, hire foreign workers in part because of a mindset in the country that has “venerated mediocrity over excellence.”

With immigration-conscious MAGA believers suitably inflamed, that was all Musk needed to elbow him out of co-leading the commission, according to a Politico report. 

Now, Mini-Me is consoling himself by contemplating a campaign for governor of Ohio, a state that has already inexplicably propelled another former tech finance guy, J.D. Vance, into the political stratosphere.

Not that Musk didn’t cause some head-scratching himself. On Monday night, exuberant over his newly exalted position, the X-Man pushed his arms upward and outward from his chest in a way that the Anti-Defamation League charitably characterized as an “awkward gesture” but that more than a few saw as a Nazi or Fascist salute.

Given Musk’s full-throated support for the far right in Europe (“Only AfD can save Germany, end of story"), his straight-arm gesture the other night looks a lot like Dr. Strangelove’s impulsive “Mein Fuhrer, I can walk!"

Throughout the day and night on Monday, you couldn’t help noticing Melania Trump’s navy blue boater-style toque. The past and present First Lady adored it so much that she kept it on even after she stepped inside the Capitol and watched her husband take the oath of office again.

The hat was really expansive. Could she have been concealing the expression in her eyes from a curious public? Moreover, the President’s niece Mary spoke for many in saying that the headgear was Melania’s ingeniously convenient device for preventing her husband from kissing her.

Much remains to be seen for Trump’s return to power, but in terms of the First Lady’s hat, one can already conclude: Mission Accomplished.

“The robber barons probably looked in the mirror and thought they were God too,” noted historian Doris Kearns Goodwin in an interview with The Financial Times this past weekend.

As they look in the mirror, how many of these contemporary fat cats must wonder, “If a know-nothing like Trump can get to the White House, why can’t I?”

Just imagine: Even now, as one billionaire after another waltzed around the inaugural ball, at least one—not unlike Yeats’ “rough beast, its hour come round at last” in “The Second Coming”—might have imagined fitting into the MAGA mold of a White House plutocrat in populist’s clothing.

(The image accompanying this post shows the new-money Gladys, George, and Bertha Russell of New York in the Season 2 premiere of The Gilded Age.)

Flashback, March 1829: Jackson Takes Oath, Followers Make Mess

In a scene likened by appalled observers to the worst excesses of the French Revolution, supporters of Andrew Jackson celebrated his inauguration in such numbers and such a rambunctious fashion that the White House suffered damage and the new President had to be spirited away from the premises. It’s a safe bet to say that nothing like it was seen before—and, thankfully, nothing like it since.

Well, almost. A college professor of mine, in his American Presidency seminar, noted that Ronald Reagan was the first White House occupant since Jackson who had been elected to reverse the course of history. In many ways, the analogy is imperfect: Jackson represented democratizing forces in his growing nation, and he invoked Presidential powers in ways his predecessors never dreamed of.

But Reagan and the broad new coalition that swept him into office, like Jackson and his, annoyed, even unnerved, observers who belonged to the opposite political party. The flaunting of conspicuous wealth by a number of Reagan supporters led humorist Calvin Trillin to term the 1981 inaugural ball “the Night of the Minks.”

“Old Hickory” had the opposite problem. There had never been so many people gathered into the capital since the seat of government had moved there nearly 30 years before. Most were well-behaved, but they had been kept a long time outside on that cold day. Once inside the unexpectedly crowded and stuffy interior, they congregated in such numbers that the wooden floor threatened to give way.

Margaret Bayard Smith, an author and fixture of Washington society for the past three decades, typified the general reaction when she wrote:

“But what a scene did we witness! The Majesty of the People had disappeared, and a rabble, a mob, of boys, negros [sic], women, children, scrambling fighting, romping. What a pity what a pity! No arrangements had been made no police officers placed on duty and the whole house had been inundated by the rabble mob.”

There is some question whether the criticism was fully deserved. Most contemporary witnesses and newspapers reported only minimal damage, and one common anecdote—about cheese ground into the White House carpets by visitors’ boots—appears to be a distortion of an event that occurred at the end of Jackson’s second term, according to a blog post by Scott Bomboy of the National Constitution Center.

But there was at least some truth to it. In the oval drawing room, the general-turned-politician was so hard-pressed by admirers that he began to gasp for air. His closest advisers managed to get him away before he got hurt. (Even washtubs full of punch, placed outside the house to lure people away, weren’t completely successful in that regard.)

The reaction to the events among Washington’s reigning establishment reflected lingering ill-feelings about Jackson’s character and intellect, an extraordinarily nasty Presidential campaign, and a sea-change in the electorate that would transform the nation’s political culture over the next three decades. Much the same thing happened with Reagan in 1981:

*A powerful personality but faulty intellect. Jackson, hardly a scholar, couldn’t spell. In fact, according to legend, he didn’t even see the need for it (“It is a damn poor mind who can't think of at least two ways to spell any word”.) Reagan was excoriated for a lack of curiosity and an attachment to odd “facts” that dissolved when scrutinized (e.g., that trees cause most pollution).

*Aftereffects of bitter campaigns. If the 1824 election, which ended up in the House of Representatives, didn’t end James Monroe’s “Era of Good Feelings,” the next Presidential campaign did. Jackson’s followers, when they weren’t flaying John Quincy Adams for a “corrupt bargain” that secured him the Presidency and made Clay his Secretary of State, charged the incumbent with “pimping” for the Czar of Russia during one of his many diplomatic posts. Adams’ supporters called Jackson an ignoramus, a murderer (for killing a man in a duel), and—in the charge with the most collateral damage—an adulterer. He and wife Rachel found out after the fact that her abusive first husband had not filed for divorce, as expected, but only permission to get one, and that thus—at least initially invalid--she was still technically married to her first husband, and the first husband spitefully charged her with adultery before the divorce decree was granted. Jackson blamed her death just after the 1828 election on the stress caused by the mudslinging, and, holding Adams personally responsible, he refused to meet with him in the pre-inaugural transition. Though the 1980 election didn’t approach 1828 in bitterness, Jimmy Carter saw Reagan, in the words of historian Douglas Brinkley, as “an unprincipled but telegenic B-grade Hollywood cowboy who had ridden into the White House on such ‘patriotic’ themes as abhorrence of government, xenophobia, and massive tax cuts.” For his part, Reagan resented Carter’s charge that his opponent would divide the nation by pitting whites against blacks and the rich against the poor.

 *Disgruntled, depressed predecessors. Jackson and Reagan succeeded men of intelligence and industry (Adams and Carter) whose stiff-necked ways hobbled them when they sought to advance their legislative program in Congress. Both Adams and Carter found it difficult to accept that their own failings as politicians contributed to their massive defeats. Adams, like his father, didn’t stick around to watch the new President inaugurated. Once out of office, Carter criticized his successor repeatedly.

*New presidents who broke with the past. Jackson, the first trans-Allegheny President, broke the line of men who held the nation’s highest office who had hailed from Virginia and Massachusetts. Reagan, a former actor who made his home in California, represented a new breed in politics: someone who had gained fame without being a lawyer, politician, or professional soldier.

*Agents of change. With his stiff delivery, Jackson didn’t express himself memorably, but he didn’t have anything memorable to express anyway. (See the inaugural address here.) Reagan had a different problem: a pre-political career as sports radio announcer, actor, TV anthology host and corporate (GE) representative made him adept at wringing nuance from every single sentence, but a glittering delivery that led him to be nicknamed “The Great Communicator” couldn’t disguise the fact that his speeches often couldn’t get past banalities. (See his address here.) But it didn’t matter, because their image overrode everything. Both Jackson and Reagan came from the West, vowing to Change Washington. Jackson heralded an age of “reform” (his word) now at hand; Reagan proclaimed that big government wasn’t the solution, but part of the problem.

*Changing economic directions. The Reaganauts chafed under the label given to their program by Democrats: “trickle-down economics.” Had any of them been so inclined, I suspect they would have been much more comfortable with a phrase from Richard Hofstadter’s classic The American Political Tradition about the Jacksonian economic program: “a phase in the expansion of liberated capitalism.” It sounds fine indeed, wrenched out of Hofstadter’s trenchant analysis. Another historian, Bray Hammond, spelled out what followed in the 1830s. The same trends held true in the 1980s: “Liberty became transformed into laisser faire. A violent, aggressive economic individualism became established. The democracy became greedy, intolerant, imperialistic, and lawless. It opened economic advantages to those who had not previously had them. . . . Wealth was won and lost, lost and won. Patient accumulation was condemned.” Yes, “impatient capitalism” might be a better description of what came to pass in both eras.

*Consolidation of coalitions and dawn of new political eras. By 1828, with property requirements and other restrictions increasingly eliminated, universal male suffrage had become the norm in virtually all the states. The age of deference, which had benefited the aristocratic Virginia and Adams dynasties, was over. A rough-hewn man, as one might expect from someone that Hofstadter termed a “one-generation aristocrat,” Jackson benefited from these tendencies, then gave it a decided push forward. Martin Van Buren, the “Little Magician” of Jackson’s Cabinet, welded Jackson's base in the Southwest, the slaveholding states of the Southeast and Northeast urban strongholds such as New York into the modern Democratic Party. Similarly, the Reagan coalition put in the driver’s seat disaffected blue-collar conservative Democrats, neo-conservatives, traditional Main Street conservatives and a “New Right” of evangelical Christians motivated by social issues.

This Day in Civil War History (Lincoln’s 2nd Inaugural Sums Up Conflict Masterfully)

March 4, 1865—As the fanatic who would kill him a month later stared from the crowd, Abraham Lincoln reached out to the wounded South by resolving in his Second Inaugural Address to “bind up the nation’s wounds”—but also explained, in terms that had to have set John Wilkes Booth’s teeth on edge, what caused the remorseless Civil War in the first place.

Lincoln’s address can be read in several ways: a) as a longtime religious skeptic’s hard-won understanding of theodicy, or the justice of God; b) as a reflection of the compassion of one of America’s most deeply humane Presidents; or c) especially in its “with malice toward none, with charity for all” peroration, as a masterpiece of political prose ranking with Thucydides’ recapping of Pericles’ Funeral Oration.

But there’s another way to look at the speech, one that I don’t think has gained much traction, partly because it is rendered in the kind of deeply analytical, prosaic tone that Lincoln used throughout his Cooper Union address (one that a post of mine discussed earlier this week.)

As in the Gettysburg Address, the President was trying to make Americans understand why a war that cost hundreds of thousands of lives had to occur and must be won. Here’s how Lincoln used the Second Inaugural Address to discuss the state of affairs on the brink of the Civil Wart:

“One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease.”

What Lincoln was talking about was and is of more than academic interest for both historians and the general public: Was this a war about saving the Union, or eradicating slavery? It mattered also to Lincoln himself, as his own thinking on the subject had evolved in four years. At the beginning of the conflict, he was careful not to interfere with slavery where it already existed, lest he lose the border states as well as the 11 that had already seceded. But as he saw how the South was using slaves to keep their economy afloat and sustain the war effort, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, serving notice that, as the North regained territory, the "peculiar institution" would be in tatters.

One sentence leaps out in the paragraph I just quoted: “All knew that this interest [slaveholding] was somehow the cause of the war.” One word throws the whole thing off kilter, reflecting a situation of greater flux and ambivalence than we recognize today: “somehow.”

Lincoln was recognizing individual choice, of a kind, with that single word. There were, of course, members of the Northern Army who were slaveholders, such as the great general George H. Thomas. On the other side, the Confederate Army included poor whites who did not own slaves, and others up the ranks who abominated “the peculiar institution.”

And yet, there is that loaded phrase, “all knew.” It was perfectly self-evident, Lincoln was saying, that slaveowners were represented disproportionately among those calling for secession. John Wilkes Booth—who, at this time, was only planning to kidnap the President, not murder him—could only fume when Lincoln assigned the primary responsibility for bringing on the war: “To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war.”

Lincoln was being blunt in a way that those gathered to honor his memory (including son Robert) at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial six decades later could not be. He was being honored by the people “for whom he saved the Union,” the inscription in the memorial read--not for extending freedom to slaves. It would take the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s--and the changing historiography that followed--before Lincoln's revolutionary assault on slavery could be understood in all its dimensions.

Among the myths that have grown about Lincoln is that he would have taken a far gentler line toward the beaten South than the Radical Republicans. For nearly a century, this was the argument espoused by those who held that Reconstruction was a hopelessly corrupt process.

To be sure, Lincoln did differ with the Radicals on some points throughout the war, and his “Ten Percent Plan” (i.e., a state could be readmitted to the Union with just 10% swearing allegiance) was easier than the “Ironclad Oath” demanded by the Radicals. But in Abraham Lincoln: The Man Behind the Myths, biographer Stephen B. Oates takes effective issue with the old Reconstruction historiography. Among the points he makes:

* Lincoln was on good personal terms with several key Radical Republicans;

* Once Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he refused to go back on his promise to free the slaves—and in fact, what he had issued as a matter of military necessity, he later decided to make a permanent law of the land through passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.

* He disenfranchised former officeholders in the Confederacy.

* He acknowledged that an army might need to be kept in the South for awhile after the war to help freed slaves maintain their freedom.

* By the end of his life, Lincoln was talking, in an admittedly tentative way, about extending legal rights and at least some voting rights, to African-American soldiers.

Oates might also have mentioned these other points that would have prevented Lincoln from throwing in his lot with the racists:

First, while willing to accommodate people, most of his positions were non-negotiable. Thus, before the war, while willing to pass legislation that slavery would not be touched where slavery also existed, he refused to compromise on the Republican ban on extending slavery into the territories.

Second, Lincoln was willing to go to extraordinary lengths—including continuing the conflict at all when it was wildly unpopular—to achieve his policy objectives. I doubt he would let his Reconstruction policy go down in flames after he had waged such unrelenting war.

Finally, though Lincoln had, in his debates seven years before with Stephen A. Douglas, been careful to say he was not for full-fledged equality for blacks, he also noted that when it came to earning what they had worked for, they were the equal of himself or any man. It is inconceivable, then, that he would permit the steady economic deprivation that the South sought to impose on blacks after the war.

Quote of the Day (Christopher Caldwell, on Americans and Poetry)

“Americans believe that what separates poetry from normal speech is either pomposity or pseudo-intellectualism. Today they are almost always right about this. There is no longer any widespread understanding of how poetry works, or what function it is supposed to perform in the lives of individuals or societies.”—Christopher Caldwell, “Official Rhyme Without Reason,” Financial Times, January 24-25, 2009

The occasion for Caldwell’s blast against modern poetry is Elizabeth Alexander’s reading of “Praise Song for the Day,” at Barack Obama’s inauguration. Personally, I had no problem with that poem—but then again, after Maya Angelou’s performance at the first Clinton inauguration, my expectations for poetry at occasions of state have been permanently lowered. (The latter sounded like a politician’s attempt to touch every base in an electoral coalition: “So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew/The African, the Native American, the Sioux ... ”)

Still, Caldwell’s larger point, I think, is on target and fair. Contrast the position of poetry with that of songs—almost any songs—which Americans have taken to heart. I think that part of the reason for the latter is that the lines in the latter rhyme.

For centuries, poets were, in Shelley’s words, “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” A big reason why was that rhyming schemes helped engrave their words in people’s memories. Poets lost their centrality when they forgot that, fact much like jazz ebbed in the affections of Americans when be-bop musicians forgot that one of the things that people loved about jazz was that they could dance to it.

Quote of the Day (George H.W. Bush, on Having “More Will Than Wallet”)

“We have more will than wallet; but will is what we need. We will make the hard choices, looking at what we have and perhaps allocating it differently, making our decisions based on honest need and prudent safety. And then we will do the wisest thing of all: We will turn to the only resource we have that in times of need always grows—the goodness and the courage of the American people.”—George H.W. Bush, Inaugural Address, January 20, 1989

The first Bush President spoke prematurely—now, following the economic crisis of this past fall, we really have more will than wallet, in no small measure due to the son who entered the Oval Office and produced a deficit and recession, the extent of which would have staggered the father who had to deal with both in his single term in office.

It’s intriguing to read this 1989 address written by then-speechwriter and current columnist Peggy Noonan (who, since then, has become critical of the Bush now departing the White House). It’s even more interesting to consider the circumstances surrounding it. Where Obama will be calling to mind Lincoln, Bush was invoking George Washington, even using the same Bible on which the first President took the oath of office.

In contrast to today, when despots and terrorists feel newly empowered, a sense of hope infuses this speech, a belief that freedom is an irresistible force sweeping all before it. It was several years into Gorbachev’s program of glasnost, and only 11 months until the Berlin Wall would come tumbling down.

Most of all, there’s the rhetoric. Some of the sentences and phrases could show up just as easily in Obama’s address with nobody being able to tell the difference in tone:

* “There is but one just use of power, and it is to serve people.”

* “My friends, we are not the sum of our possessions. They are not the measure of our lives.”

* "America is never wholly herself unless she is engaged in high moral principle.”

“I am speaking of a new engagement in the lives of others, a new activism, hands-on and involved, that gets the job done.”

This Bush would not have urged Americans to go shopping after 9/11. I still believe he was involved up to his eyeballs in the Iran-Contra scandal. But in his belief that there had to be more to government and the meaning of people’s lives than getting and spending, he was anything but the successor to Reagan that many conservative Republicans wanted, or that his son strove to embody throughout most of his Presidency.

The man who delivered this speech was not the politician who by the end of his term practically twisted and turned himself into a pretzel for the thankless task of satisfying both the Religious Right and self-styled “revolutionary” Newt Gingrich.

Instead, he sounded like the youth who took to heart what he heard Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson say at the commencement address at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., about the American soldier being “brave without being brutal, self-reliant without boasting, becoming a part of irresistible might without losing faith in individual liberty.”

It’s that sense of reserve, humility and service to others in Washington that has gone missing and needs to be recovered if we hope to recover our moral balance, never mind our economic bearings.

Quote of the Day (CNN, on Invocations of God in Obama’s Inaugural Oath)

“WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President-elect Barack Obama will invoke God when he takes the oath of office January 20, despite a lawsuit filed by atheist and non-religious groups, according to an attorney for Chief Justice John Roberts, who will administer the oath.”—Bill Mears, CNN, “Obama Wants to Invoke God During Inauguration Oath,” on the latest quarrel over separation of church and state.

(I heard about this yesterday at 5 pm mass in my parish. Sure enough, it was true.

The extent to which separation of church and state keeps getting invoked is aggravating. Atheists and other secularists are fond of evoking the phrase “wall of separation” between church and state, but nowhere in the Constitution is that mentioned: it comes from a letter of Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802.

Several points about the letter:

1) Jefferson refers correctly to the Constitution banning Congress making laws establishing a religion or of interfering with its free exercise. The “establishment” part refers to public money being used for a particular religion—the condition that obtained in Virginia until the mid-1780s, a period in which the Anglican Church was funded by the government at the expense of people of other faiths. That state of affairs ended with the 1786 Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom written by Jefferson and passed with the help of his friend and chief political lieutenant James Madison. Nowhere does the statute nor the Constitution mention banning invocations of religion from the public square.

2) The Constitution was the product of many minds, not just one. The deism of Jefferson (who, while influential in the creation of the republic, did not participate in the writing or debate over the Constitution, as he was in France as U.S. ambassador) was shared by several of the Founding Fathers, but by no means a majority.

3) The infallibility of the pope may be argued from here to eternity, but I have a feeling that Jefferson’s can be dispensed with quickly. He wasn’t. Many of the same people who invoke him most reflexively on the “wall of separation” properly abominate his views on slavery, and I wouldn’t be surprised if quite a few wouldn’t mind the name of this longtime slaveholder being removed from public schools across the country for his association with the “peculiar institution.”

4) In the case of his reply to the Baptist group, Jefferson acted in the two ways most congenial to him: as a lawyer and politician. The crux of the Baptist group’s complaint was about their state’s attitude toward their religion, not the federal government. The First Amendment said nothing about a state making a law about this, only Congress, and that is the only legislative body to which Jefferson refers. Because of charges of atheism leveled against him in the 1800 Presidential race, he wanted to give no comfort to any political opponents—and, once you get past the good will he expressed toward the Baptist group, Jefferson never specifically says that the Connecticut law should be changed.

Over time, the nation’s courts have acted properly in incorporating the protections offered by the Constitution and Bill of Rights to states as well as the federal government, and that includes the First Amendment’s guarantees concerning religion. But it’s important not to push the meaning of those guarantees beyond their intent, as the plaintiff in this case, Michael Newdow, is doing.

The “so help me God” that Presidents say is a matter of custom, not law. Whether Obama says it or not is up to him, as it has been to his predecessors (most of whom went ahead and used it). Because the phrase “so help me God” is not legally required, there’s no basis for taking this to court. The only people who benefit from these nuisance suits are, predictably, lawyers.

Obama’s invocation of God steals no money from the purse of Newdow or any other secular person, nor does it deny his right to declaim against religion as much as he likes. Newdow (who filed similar unsuccessful suits after the 2001 and 2001 inaugurals) should save his money and thank his lucky stars that he lives in a country where his views are tolerated—then he ought to consider tolerating the views of others.)