John Edwards

Once again, the pundits chew over the question of the relevance of a politician's private life to his public career. I am not a prude, nor do I think that I am naive about human beings' capacity for duplicity. But I do think, in this case at least, John Edwards's behavior in his private life does have something to say to us about his politics.

When this year's Democratic presidential contest was first taking shape, Edwards positioned himself to appeal to people like me: left-liberals concerned about economic inequality and the plight of the poor. Despite the attractiveness of his message, I was skeptical of Edwards's candidacy, primarily because it didn't jibe with his record as a senator and vice-presidential candidate, where he had positioned himself as Southern moderate. However, the issue which ultimately convinced me not to support Edwards was his decision to continue his campaign in the face of his wife Elizabeth's diagnosis with terminal metastatic breast cancer.

My decision was not based, however, on a belief that Edwards was selfish or evil; rather it derived from my history as the spouse of woman who died of breast cancer. Based on my own experience, I thought that John Edwards needed to be with his wife and children during the next few years whether the Edwardses knew it or not. In other words, I opposed John Edwards's candidacy for his own good and that of his family.

In light of the latest revelations (and the fact that I believe that Edwards has still not come completely clean), I see John and Elizabeth in a different light. John's cheating on his cancer patient wife is reprehensible, no matter what his role in life. But the fact that he and, apparently, Elizabeth were willing to subject their children, their party, and their country to the risk that his affair with Rielle Hunter would become public during his presidential campaign strikes me as evidence of a self-centered ambition seldom seen in American politics. It's not really surprising that a bigtime plaintiff's lawyer would be comfortable risking other people's welfare to advance his own interests, but it is still sort of shocking to me that he would risk putting a Republican in the White House to satisfy his own desires. I now see John and Elizabeth as hillbilly MacBeths: as ambitious as the Clintons, but not as principled!

More Two-Wheeled Politics

Word on the street is that the readers of TBC just can't get enough of the bike politics posts!

In case you missed it, check out this video of a New York City cop body slamming a Critical Mass rider off his bike into the curb. The cop then proceeded to arrest the rider for assaulting a police officer, etc., basing his arrest on a affidavit that the video shows is a pack of lies. Apparently there is a long history of conflict, legal and otherwise, between the Critical Mass folks and NYPD, but, to me, the hatred manifested by Officer Patrick Pogan when he shoved Christopher Long off his bike on to the sidewalk is hard to understand. My God, the man was riding a bike down the street! It's not a crime!

I'm sure that fans of the internal combustion engine are already raising money for Officer Pogan's defense, but, in the end, I expect that this outburst will wind up costing the City some money and, I hope, the cop his job.

Fatal Attractions

Advocates of bikes as transportation often make the point (as I have here ) that motorists' anger at reckless bike riders is overblown because such bikers are primarily risks to themselves. Well, its a good theory, and, I think it's true, but I feel compelled to point out that, here in Austin, we've had 2 fatal traffic accidents this month in which one of the those involved was on a bike but the person who was killed was NOT.

On July 6, Jessie McFarlin, who was struck by a bicycle while he was trying to cross the street at night , died after several days in the hospital. The cyclist was not charged, as police said that McFarlin was jay walking. The bike was traveling 25-30 mph. I don't know many of the details, but the accident does point out the particular dangers of biking after dark. Most bicycle lighting is designed primarily to make the bike visible to drivers, not to illuminate the bike's path to its rider. Thus, it's easy to outride your headlight.

The stranger of the 2 accidents occurred on July 20, when Ernest Kirchner was killed when his motorcycle collided with a bicycle. The bicyclist was treated and released. The story is not very clear as to how the accident occurred, but it did note that Kirchner was not wearing a helmet.

So, I guess that the exception proves the rule. Neither of the people killed in these accidents was in a car. Indeed, the two accidents are notable precisely because of their "man bites dog" aspect. But they do serve as reminders that bike riders can hurt others if they are not careful.

Suburbia

It's often tempting to see (for me at least) to see short-term crises as symptomatic of major change, but as I've noted before I think we are at the beginning of a real change in the American culture as a result of the end of cheap oil. It looks as though high gas prices are triggering the end of the suburban America in which the Baby Boom and subsequent generations have lived our entire lives. It seems possible that 10 or 20 years American cities will look very different from the sprawling middle class suburbs we are used to, with the rich in center cities, the poor occupying the outer ring of abandoned middle class subdivisions, and the various middle class strata arranged in rings between them.

Big John Cornyn

For those of you wonder what it's really like to live in Texas, check out this honest-to-god ad for our incumbent U.S. Senator. Now try to imagine living some place where someone who gets paid to do this kind of stuff honestly thinks that this will help Cornyn get re-elected. Got that? OK, now . . . a little bigger stretch . . . imagine that you're living in a place where this ad really will help Cornyn get elected.

Obama and the Death Penalty

On June 25 the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the imposition of a death sentence for the crime of rape of a child is cruel and unusual punishment and therefore unconstitutional. The opinion (pdf), written by Justice Kennedy on behalf of himself and 4 of his colleagues, is well-reasoned. As an opponent of the death penalty, I believe that the Court's decision is correct.

Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama immediately announced that he opposed the decision, saying, "I think that the rape of a small child, 6 or 8 years old, is a heinous crime and if a state makes a decision that under narrow, limited, well-defined circumstances the death penalty is at least potentially applicable that that does not violate our Constitution." He has thus put himself in the position of attacking the ultra-conservative Supreme Court from the right on the issue of capital punishment.

Those of us who believe that capital punishment is a moral and legal nightmare are, unfortunately, used to watching liberal politicians pander to the public's pro-death penalty sentiments, especially if we live in Texas. All of the Democratic candidates for Texas governor in my memory have supported executions, including the sainted Ann Richards. Bill Clinton notoriously took a break from campaigning for president in 1992 so that he could go home to Arkansas and sign the death warrant for Ricky Ray Rector, a brain-damaged death row inmate. Nevertheless, given the facts that public support for the death penalty seems to be declining and Obama, a former professor of constitutional law, might be expected to have a more sophisticated view of the subject than most politicians, I had hoped for better from this candidate.

1972-2008

Although Barack Obama likes to say that his campaign represents a break from the boomers' obsessive re-fighting of the battles of the Sixties, the McCain-Obama race represents the most clear-cut contrast of Vietnam era symbols since the last Vietnam era Presidential race, Nixon-McGovern in 1972.

The most obvious similarity between the two campaigns is that, like McGovern, Obama, a longtime opponent of the Iraq War, is running as a peace candidate, while McCain, like Nixon, is a war supporter who wants to fight to "victory" in Iraq. But there are other ways in which McCain and Obama remind us of the Age of Aquarius.

McCain is, of course, a Vietnam vet, a Navy pilot who was shot down over North Vietnam and held as a POW for 5 years. This aspect of his life is fraught with meaning to Americans who lived through the Vietnam disaster. To those of us who opposed the war, bomber pilots represented the most personally culpable of the American warriors fighting what we knew was an "immoral" war. They were volunteers, officers, "lifers" -- true believers in the American war who rained anonymous death on the Vietnamese peasants below them. (My ex-wife's freshman roommate, whose father was an Air Force pilot in Vietnam, came back to their room crying after a fellow student told her that her father was a "murderer." The girl sobbed that she knew that most of her fellow students didn't agree with this assessment. My ex-wife tried to explain to her gently that, in fact, they did.)

From the standpoint of those Americans who supported the war, McCain's status as a POW plays into one of their major archetypes of the war, that of the American serviceman who, having given his all to win the war, was abandoned by the backstabbing anti-war movement on the home front. This right wing tendency operated for decades under the black POW-MIA flag, and, McCain, subliminally at least, evokes that trope.

Obama was a middle schooler when the Vietnam War ended in 1975, so he doesn't have the kind of personal history in the events of the era that McCain does. However, his life story clearly puts him on the counter-cultural side of the Sixties divide. First of all, of course, he's black, and whether it wants to remember it or not, the defining issue of the Sixties-era right was opposition to black liberation. Second, he's the son of an African, suggesting the Pan-African elements of the Black Nationalist movements of the era, as does the Black Liberation theology of his now infamous pastor, Jeremiah Wright. As an adult, Obama chose to work as a community organizer and a civil rights lawyer, both jobs that were essentially invented during the Sixties. No matter how mainstream his politics are, he reminds people of the old issues.

So how does this play out in this year's election? It's hard to tell. McCain's status as a Vietnam vet explains a good deal of the deference given him by boomer reporters who didn't serve and it also makes it more difficult for Obama to attack him personally. Obama's evocation of Sixties symbols explains, I think, much of the reason why he attracted the support of white educated upper-income Democrats, many of whom were part of the anti-war counter-culture and the opposition of working class white primary voters who were on the other side of that divide. But 2008 is not 1972. The end of the Cold War and the disastrous Iraq War have reduced the appeal of the bellicose right. And, of course, millions of Americans who will vote in this election were not yet born when the last American helicopter left the roof of the US Embassy in Saigon.