Tis the season for pomp, circumstance and politics -- May 19, 2016 column

By MARSHA MERCER

President Barack Obama isn’t on the ballot, but he is on the campaign trail. His harshest attack yet on Donald J. Trump previewed the president’s role in the fall campaign.   

“In politics and in life, ignorance is not a virtue,” Obama said May 15 in his commencement address at Rutgers University. “It’s not cool to not know what you’re talking about. That’s not keeping it real or telling it like it is. That’s not challenging political correctness. That’s just not knowing what you’re talking about.”

The partisan campaign pitch by a president is unusual – what isn’t this election cycle? -- but Obama isn’t the first to take center stage at graduation exercises and throw down a political or policy gauntlet.

As war raged in Europe in 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt used a commencement address at the University of Virginia, where his son, Franklin Jr., was graduating from the law school, to warn the United States could no longer be “a lone island in a world dominated by the philosophy of force.”

Italy had declared war on France and Great Britain just that morning, and FDR said: 

“On this tenth day of June 1940, the hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor.

“On this tenth day of June 1940, in this university founded by the first great American teacher of democracy, we send forth our prayers and our hopes to those beyond the seas who are maintaining with magnificent valor their battle for freedom,” he said.

The speech, received with cheers and rebel yells in Charlottesville, presaged the United States’ eventual entry into World War II. With the election only months away and Roosevelt was running for a third term, though, some Democrats worried FDR would alienate voters.

In a commencement address at the University of Michigan in May 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson set the theme for his presidential campaign and his domestic agenda when he outlined his goals for a Great Society. His ambitious plan called for no less than rebuilding cities, cleaning up the environment and transforming education.

Twenty-seven years later, President George H. W. Bush chose commencement in Ann Arbor to open his reelection bid, saying Johnson’s social agenda had not only failed but backfired.

“Programs designed to ensure racial harmony generated animosity. Programs intended to help people out of poverty invited dependency,” Bush said in May 1991.

“We don’t need another Great Society with huge and ambitious programs administered by the incumbent few. We need a Good Society built upon the deeds of the many, a society that promotes service, selflessness and action,” Bush said.

Obama renewed the debate about the scope of government and the level of political discourse in a commencement speech at the University of Michigan in 2011.

“What troubles me is when I hear people say that all of government is inherently bad,” he said.

“We’ve got politicians calling each other all sorts of unflattering names. Pundits and talking heads shout at each other. The media tends to play up every hint of conflict because it makes for a sexier story – which means anyone interested in getting coverage feels compelled to make their arguments as outrageous and as incendiary as possible,” Obama said.

Trash-talking about government has only gotten worse, and Trump’s candidacy five years later makes Obama seem prescient. Trumpians endorse the isolationist tendencies FDR rued so long ago.

In his Rutgers speech, Obama said, “If the past two decades have taught us anything, it’s that the biggest challenges we face cannot be solved in isolation.”

He scorned the ideas of building a wall to keep out Mexicans and banning Muslims from entering the country as “not just a betrayal of our values” but as actions that “would alienate the very communities at home and abroad who are our most important partners in the fight against violent extremism.”

In reply, Trump typically fired a quick, personal hit. 

“`In politics, and in life, ignorance is not a virtue.’ This is a primary reason that President Obama is the worst president in U.S. history,” he tweeted.

Obama will have many chances over the next six months to use the bully pulpit to assail Trump. His final commencement address as president is June 2 at the U.S. Air Force Academy, where he likely will focus on the United States’ role in the world.

   

©2016 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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No lie -- politicians do -- March 10, 2016 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Since Jimmy Carter said in 1976 that he would never lie to us, presidential candidates have faced the question: Will you lie to the American people?

Here’s how Hillary Clinton handled the question last month:

“You’re asking me to say, `Have I ever?’ I don’t believe I ever have…I don’t believe I ever will. I am going to do the best I can to level with the American people,” she told Scott Pelley of CBS News.

Her critics say Clinton lied about the Benghazi attack to families of the fallen, her private email account at the State Department and other things. She denies lying.

So here’s another question: Do a politician’s lies matter anymore?  

Republican Donald Trump, Clinton’s likely competitor in November, is such an equal-opportunity prevaricator that no one asks him if he will lie. People expect him to change his story. His supporters like his bluff and bluster enough to forgive his whoppers.  

After Trump jumped into the presidential race last June, he played so loose with truth that PolitiFact, a fact-checking site, awarded him the 2015 Lie of the Year for his collective misstatements. 

When primary voters weigh the most important characteristics of candidates, “honest and trustworthy” is not high on the scale. Among Democratic voters in Virginia on Super Tuesday, for example, only about one in four rated “honest and trustworthy” the most important candidate quality, while 36 percent rated “the right experience” most important.

It may seem quaint to us now, but voters in 1976 saw the pledge of a peanut-growing Georgia governor as a refreshing change after the lies, scandal and bad odor that permeated the Nixon years. 

Only a few years later, though, the oil crisis hit and Carter’s scolding tone turned off voters.

“In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does but by what one owns,” Carter said in his “Crisis of Confidence” speech in July 1979. It’s known as his “malaise” speech, though he never uttered the word.

We may like the idea of our president telling the truth and only the truth – but in practice we punish those who say things we don’t like. In 1980, voters joined Ronald Reagan in booting Carter back to Georgia.

In 1984, Democrat Walter Mondale, running against President Ronald Reagan, said at the Democratic National Convention: “Let’s tell the truth. President Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won’t tell you. I just did.”

Mondale’s politically motivated honesty help bury him that November. It’s worth remembering that while Reagan did not propose any tax increases in his second term, he did go along with those sent his way by Congress. Revenue enhancements, anyone?

Voters also turn on presidents who honestly change their minds. Just four years after Mondale’s debacle, George H.W. Bush declared at the Republican National Convention in 1988, “Read my lips:  no new taxes.” When the economy did not improve as he expected, Bush agreed to a bipartisan plan that raised taxes in 1990.

Come 1992, Bill Clinton used Bush’s broken tax pledge very effectively, torpedoing Bush’s re-election bid. In 2014, the elder Bush received the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage award.

Hillary Clinton has a sterling resume but her image for honesty has long been tarnished. Eight years ago this week, when she was battling Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination, only 44 percent of Americans thought she was honest and trustworthy, the Gallup organization reported.

Her stature has diminished since then. Today, just 37 percent of Americans see Clinton as honest and trustworthy, the latest ABC News-Washington Post poll reported Tuesday. Clinton says such polls are painful to her. The silver lining for Clinton: Only 27 percent see Trump as honest and trustworthy.  

Back in 2008, candidate Barack Obama told Clinton in a debate, “You’re likable enough, Hillary.”

Forty years after a presidential candidate promised never to lie, we’re heading for a November showdown between two candidates most voters see as not honest and trustworthy. This election may come down to which one is likable enough.

© 2016 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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