Propulsion

Sometimes we’re lucky with our mentors - the folks who guide us through the swamp to higher ground.
I remembered one vividly today, as I always do when the orchestra is playing Beethoven - Phil Sturholm, a legend as a cameraman but known by reporters and photographers alike as a great teacher of journalism.
Phil would say, and there was much more as well, that television news stories needed a pulse, a momentum forward, that one shot should lead to the next with logic and clarity.
I always think of Phil, that advice, when the orchestra plays Beethoven - today the Eroica, the Third Symphony. There’s a power, thrust, and propulsion to the musical language - sound itself telling a story - that carries a listener forward with an unforgettable force - one reason his music, like Bach before him, is played again and again in different centuries and cultures. 

Music is a language; no less than the spoken and written word, it needs not only eloquence, but clarity and force. Its themes - its story lines - must move us on, tell us something tangible, and give us a conclusion with a power that flows from all the sound before it. Beethoven's secret sauce.

So, thank you Phil, and Ludwig - when I’m in the balcony listening, you’re both there…...

New Hampshire

New Hampshire didn't settle much, except that - emphatically - Trump and Sanders aren't going away any time soon.

-- To digress for a bit:  the fact that Sanders and Trump so thoroughly whipped everyone else in the field - the Donald got more votes than Cruz, Bush, Rubio combined, and Bernie is swamping HRC by some 50 thousand votes - ought to give punditry a moment of pause.  These are the wise folks who told us last summer that both of them would fade in a hurry, dismissing Trump especially as some kind of blow-dry joke.  We'd be wise to take any further declarations with some of the stuff in the salt shaker --

The Carolinas and further South will be more hostile ground for Bernie, and possibly for John Kasich - he did more than a hundred town halls in NH but they don't know him at all below the Mason-Dixon Line.  Still, as someone who found Kasich to be one of the few adults in the GOP pack, it's encouraging to see his essentially positive and non-hysterical message get some traction - he was a poor 2nd to the Trump Tower, but whipped Cruz, Rubio, and Bush easily.

Still, Bush has $40 million in the bank, and can pull a Rubio now, claiming that even a 4th place finish keeps him in the game.  I don't know how Rubio can turn a poor 5th place into a "win" ala Iowa, and he didn't even try tonight.  Bush may do very well in South Carolina, so the GOP fight will likely drag well into the spring, even to the convention - usually a coronation, but this time it could be a dogfight on the floor.

Arrivederci Christie, Carson, and Fiorina.......

Two cents worth:

- Trump's speech was all bluster - content free.  Kasich was actually quite moving, talking about our national need to get beyond mutual demonization.

- HRC gave one of the better speeches of her whole campaign - a ringing call, striking all the bells from climate change to crumbling infrastructure.  Too late?  Is she too old school in a new game?

- Bernie was hoarse, hit his usual marks on the Left, went too long, but he's tapped into something real that's very much alive.

- If Kasich can keep the fire burning, we've got a 5-candidate run in the GOP camp  (maybe they'll burn through all the Koch money by Labor Day.......)

For the political junkies, it's the best of times.........

HIllary 1 - Competiton 0

Hillary Clinton won that one.
No question.
No wonder - no one else on that stage carries the baggage that always accompanies a Clinton, but no one has, either, her length of experience at the peak of public life.
And it showed tonight.
She even got a bit of help from Bernie when the inevitable question of the Clinton emails hit the floor:

“Let me say something that may not be great politics, but I think the secretary is right — and that is that the American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails!"

He may get a thank you note in the morning.....

Sanders had some trouble fully explaining his varying votes on guns, and came back too often to his the "1% have all the money" theme, but he didn't hurt himself - it's just that the Clinton strength shone stronger in this first debate.

You had to like her spin on a political season where outsiders are winning the game to date:

"I can't think of anything more outsider than electing the first woman president."

Of the other three candidates, O'Malley likely gained a few points - not enough to save him - for the next poll, but I don't understand why Chafee and Webb are even on the stage - they're blips now, and will be tomorrow.

Bernanke - no longer a Republican.....

In a bright ballroom of Seattle University, Ben Bernanke and Gary Locke took us back to a darker time, 8 years back when one-half of all mortgages were underwater, unemployment was north of 10 percent, and panic ran amok inside the American financial system. 

It’s a familiar history now – the subprime mortgage scam, the collapse of Lehmann Brothers, the near death of AIG - the world’s biggest insurer of financial deals - the still-debated $700 billion TARP bailout, and a regulatory system that couldn’t keep up with derivatives and other at the edge investment inventions.
Bernanke, director of the Federal Reserve System through all of it, came to the ballroom – interviewed by Locke – to tout his book about America at the edge of ruin (his spin), “The Courage to Act.”

Some moments:

- the subprime mortgage collapse and other events may have set off the financial run, but it was panic – a collapse of belief – that really caused the damage. An economic system depends on confidence; when that’s gone, the lights go out. 

- Lehmann Bros. went down because there was no buyer to save it, and no TARP yet to bail it out – Congress wouldn’t act, telling Bernanke “there’s been no real damage yet.” 

- Bernanke throws a lot of blame on that same Congress for its unwillingness to act on the fiscal side – pushing more $$$ into the economy – while leaving the burden to the Fed’s monetary moves re liquidity. They, he claims, just didn’t do their job. 

- he’s no longer a Republican, describing the party as in the hands now of know-nothings who know nothing about governing.

- asked about dangers to come, he warned that the current recovery still isn’t working for everyone, not with increasing inequality, and fails the basic purpose of an economic system – to produce broad-based benefit.

- asked if he’d seen the film about the near collapse of 2008-2009 - ”Too Big Too Fail” – he said “No, but I like to say that I saw the original………”

"Bridge of Spies"

Elegant.
That's the word I want to describe Spielberg's "Bridge of Spies."
Film as craft.

As in the way every scene - in its organization, extras, storefronts, clothing, whatever, absolutely recreates a time and place. Yes, it is 1957 again, at least on screen.

And though perhaps a touch stylized from setting to setting, it brings back - in a gripping way - the Cold War, the disastrous flight of Francis Gary Powers' U-2, and the dark mood of a time when nuclear war seemed possible, a time when we still drilled in school against that possibility. We live again in a divided Berlin, see the despair and death at the Wall, watch the potentially deadly (and never-ending) chess game of global power.

But what stays with me tonight is something one hero of the time asks without really using these words, "Who are we?" - meaning what are our true values as Americans?
James Donovan asks because those who chose him to defend the Russian spy Rudolf Abel seem to suggest that the verdict is certain, that the usual rules of American justice need not apply. Yet Donavan defends Abel the spy as he would any defendant, and nearly wins an evidentiary appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, thus upholding enduring values worth far more than the fate of a single spy.

The impulse to fairness, to the right values, comes again when Donavan negotiates the exchange of Abel for Powers, insisting - against the CIA and others in government - that the spy swap also include a young American student imprisoned on the east side of the Wall.

"Who are we?" It's always the important question. Asked another way in a time of every-increasing surveilliance and fear of terror by John le Carré:
“How long can we defend ourselves – you and we - by methods of this kind, and still remain the kind of society that is worth defending?” 

(And a cheer for Tom Hanks as Donovan, and Mark Rylance as Abel. 
Acting as craft....)

Our Time.....

When we were
Young
And dreamers
We imagined
No end
Only beginnings.

And when they
Came we
Lived them
Day by day
Believing that
Our time would
Never end.

And now I
Wonder what
Was the dream?
To live in health
And for so long?

To have worked
And thought, to
Find the narrative
In fragments
Of truth?

Or just to
Wake, to fill
The hours with
Query, with wonder,
Then to sleep again
'Til morn?

We lived that
Dream - perhaps
Not that one of
Youth, but
One of time and
Chance.

And no, we are
Not done
Not yet,
Only in search
Of the dream
To come.

What Rough Beast.....

Something is stirring, brooding, out there.
Sometimes, as Robert Reich said at Town Hall last night, we don't know what it is until after it happens.
But see - a Trump and a Carson getting half the votes in early polls of Republican primary voters.  One is all bombast and noise, the other quietly, as one GOP writer claims this morning, "imbecilic."  Yet they lead, for now, one of our two major political tribes.

When in any other time would a national political candidate - see Carson - be rewarded for comparing the United States to the Nazi Third Reich?  Or say of a medical coverage plan - Obamacare - that it is "the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery."  Or claim that the sitting President of the United States is modeling his policies after those of Cuba and Russia?  See Carson, again.
Yes, there is always over the cliff rhetoric, but rewarded, cheered on, by so many?

As Peter Wehner, a GOP consultant who served in the last three GOP administrations, writes:"....the usual ways voters judge a candidate - experience, governing achievements, mastery of issues - have been devalued.........Reason has given way to demagogy."

Reich offers a sunnier view - that yes, there's a rumbling out there, but in his Berkely economics classes he sees an idealism, a commitment to public service, and in American history he sees a pattern - that when the political/ecnomic system goes off track, leaving too many out of its benefits, there's adjustment (see TR's progressivism, FDR's New Deal, Johnson's New Society).
That's his sense of this moment, of the anti-establishment fever - a moment for sweeping change, but with a warning that there are two kinds of populism.

- reform populism - see the Roosevelts and LBJ
- authoritarian populism - the rise of scapegoating, of government is evil rhetoric, of obstructionism as policy. See the GOP House, see Trump, Carson, Cruz, et al

Which way history goes depends on a citizenry, its information and drive to seek fact over noise, and its engagement.
Politics, says Reich as so many have before, is not a spectator sport.