Beneath the Dignity of a Great Nation

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I really don't know — as I have said here before — when I developed my personal fascination with history, especially American history.

But whenever I did, I certainly reached the conclusion at roughly the same time that America was a great nation — or, at least, a great idea for a nation.

It isn't a perfect nation, but it has always aspired to be one. When its faults have been brought to the attention of its people as a whole, sincere efforts have usually been made to correct them. And I have always drawn inspiration from that.

There have been complaints, from time to time. The complaints are not always warranted, but sometimes they are — the FEMA foot–dragging after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans eight years ago comes to mind — but, for the most part, this nation and its leaders have honestly striven to keep promises to the people.

Again, there are exceptions to that, one of which has been on obvious public display in the last few months.

Barack Obama came here to Dallas in April to participate in the opening of the library dedicated to the presidency of his immediate predecessor. When that was over, he and his entourage traveled roughly 70 miles southwest of here to the town of West, Texas, which is near Waco, to mourn the deaths and injuries that were suffered in an explosion at a fertilizer plant.

(The plant, it is always worth mentioning, produced the kind of fertilizer that was used to blow up the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995.)

Lots of people think it is a constitutional duty of the president to mourn with and to comfort Americans who have been affected by a disaster, but it isn't. You won't find a single word about it in the Constitution or its amendments. It's one of those things that has evolved over time.

"Though the non–administrative capacities of the commander–in–chief were not set out in the Constitution," wrote Dan Fastenberg in TIME two years ago, "the tradition of forging an intimate relationship with the American people goes all the way back to George Washington."

President Lincoln spoke at the dedication of the cemetery in Gettysburg, producing perhaps his most memorable speech as president. President Harding and two of his predecessors attended the dedication of Arlington National Cemetery.

In my lifetime, I can recall a few instances of presidential participation in moments of great sorrow. Ronald Reagan appeared at a ceremony honoring the astronauts who were lost in the Challenger explosion, greeted the family members, embraced some of them. Bill Clinton came to Oklahoma City (when I was living in nearby Norman) to share the grief over the bombing of the federal building there.

Less than a year into his presidency, George W. Bush comforted a grieving nation after the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Obama has attempted to comfort Americans on several occasions since becoming president — at Fort Hood following the 2009 shootings, in Arizona following the shootings in 2011, in Boston earlier this year after the explosions at the annual marathon there.

The trip to West wasn't anything unusual.

But it is worth remembering the words he spoke that day — his pledge that the federal government would be there to help the people of that small town long after the attention it was receiving at the time had disappeared — in light of the decision by FEMA to deny additional funds to help West's recovery.

Now FEMA says it won't provide additional funds to the people of that small town.

FEMA may well be correct when it says that the death and destruction "is not of the severity and magnitude that warrants a major disaster declaration."

But the fact is that, when the president was here in April, he made a promise to the people of West. He didn't carry Texas in either of his presidential elections, but my memory is that West was glad he came to the memorial service to share the town's grief and grateful for his promise of continued support even when no one was paying attention anymore.

Can they be blamed for feeling abandoned by their government now?

When the president makes a promise to a constituency, that is a solemn oath — not all that different from the oath Obama has taken twice except that he didn't place his left hand on the Bible when he took it. A president's word is his bond with the people, and all the agencies in the government that are required to fulfill his promise are honor bound to do so.

Failing to do so is far beneath the dignity of a great nation.

Heckuva Job?

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Please, someone, tell me that Barack Obama did not say, on The Daily Show last night, that Larry Summers did a "heckuva job" as Obama's economic adviser.

I mean, unemployment was around 6.5% when Obama became president in January 2009. Today, virtually on the eve of the 2010 midterm elections, unemployment stands at around 9.5%.

Doesn't sound like a heckuva job to me. For formerly hard–working Americans who have found themselves tossed on the economic scrap heap, the last couple of years have been as devastating as any hurricane.

And, of course, that phrase — "heckuva job" — is bound to remind most Americans of George W. Bush's much–ridiculed endorsement of former FEMA head Michael Brown's handling of the disaster response/relief effort.

Oh. Obama did use that phrase, eh?

Well, that's bad enough. I mean, throughout his presidential campaign — and long after he took office, when he was awarded a Nobel Prize essentially on spec — Obama and his supporters portrayed him as the anti–Bush.

Dubya couldn't speak in complete sentences — although he did use completely nonexistent words at times (remember misunderestimate?). But Obama was well educated, a constitutional scholar. He'd written more books than Dubya had read, a diehard Obama supporter told me two years ago.

He would restore literacy — among other things — to the presidency. We wouldn't cringe, anymore, I was told, when the president of the United States stood up to speak.

And yet, here he was, in his attempt to appeal to the very groups that got him elected in the first place (and now appear to be abandoning him), and one of the gems to spring from his mouth was an unavoidable reminder of one of the bleakest chapters of recent American history.

Speaking of the American economy with the same words used to praise the incompetence of the "response" of FEMA to Hurricane Katrina is hardly reassuring.

And essentially saying "Well, things could have been worse" doesn't seem likely to rally anyone beyond Obama's unshakably devoted supporters — and their numbers continue to dwindle — to get out and vote next Tuesday.

But, frankly, being reprimanded, however gently, by Jon Stewart, who admonished him that "You don't want to use that phrase, dude" only serves to remind many voters of how amateurishly many things have been handled by this administration.

And for the president of the United States to be called "dude" is demeaning to the office, no matter what one thinks of its occupant.

Obama should have said so.

The Turning Point

After winning the 2004 presidential election, George W. Bush said he had acquired "political capital" during the campaign.

It didn't take him long to squander it, though.

And I believe that he began running through his stash on this day five years ago.

For it was on this day that Terri Schiavo's feeding tube was removed at her husband's request.

The Terri Schiavo case has to rank as one of the saddest episodes in recent American life. It would have been a tragic matter even if it had remained private, involving only Schiavo's biological family, her spouse and her doctors.

But it was made even more tragic — not to mention shameful — by the way that public figures and politicians, mostly Republicans (but some Democrats as well) and from the White House on down, elbowed their way in.

Just to provide a little background — a little refresher, unpleasant though it is, to put things in perspective — Schiavo collapsed in her home in February 1990. She suffered respiratory and cardiac arrest, but she survived, although there was considerable brain damage, leaving her in what is called a "persistent vegetative state" (PVS), which is a state of very deep unconsciousness.

Before the Schiavo case came along, there were really only two instances of PVS that had been in the news in my memory:

1. Sunny von Bülow, who suffered severe brain damage in 1980 and remained in a PVS until her death nearly 30 years later.
2. Karen Ann Quinlan, a young woman who lost consciousness after a night of partying in 1975 and lapsed into a PVS, igniting a legal battle that resulted in significant precedents in right–to–die law.

There were other cases, I'm sure, but those are the ones I remember being prominent in the news. Suffice to say, PVS was not something with which most people were familiar, even five years ago. Anyway, there had been a lot of legal wrangling by the lawyers representing Schiavo's husband and her parents, especially since 1998. Her husband wanted to remove her life support; her parents wanted to prevent that from happening. By 2005, the case had reached a crossroads. No matter which way it went, it seemed, there was no turning back. And all sorts of prominent people — Jesse Jackson, the governor of Florida (Jeb Bush), the majority leader of the U.S. Senate (Bill Frist), the speaker of the House (Dennis Hastert) and the president of the United States (George W. Bush) — intervened, ostensibly because they were pro–life, when the judicial machinery appeared to be favoring Schiavo's husband. Their involvement turned a private family tragedy into a national debate. And there were times when it bordered on the bizarre. Like when Frist, a doctor by training as well as professional experience prior to his entry into politics, opposed removing Schiavo's life support on the basis of what he had seen in a video tape. Frist was an experienced surgeon who had performed more than 100 heart and/or lung transplants. But he was not a neurologist. And he was criticized by many for making such a crucial diagnosis based only on a video tape. Many denounced the involvement of both the Congress and the White House in the Schiavo matter. For my part, I have always been fond of the editorial that ran in the Boston Globe, which stated, "The US Congress has no place at Terri Schiavo's bedside. Neither does the president of the United States." At the conclusion of a strongly worded editorial, the Globe wrote, "They say they are doing God's work, but should consider that it is man's machinery that has prolonged this sad shell of a human being. All religions teach that there is a time to let go." Their reluctance to let go amid their protestations that they were pro–life understandably made many people suspicious a few months later, when Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans, producing the kind of death and destruction that is rarely seen on this continent.

At that time, when TV cameras transmitted images of the catastrophe that was unfolding, Americans were baffled and, frankly, frightened by the delayed response they saw coming from the government at all levels. Black Americans wondered — not without some justification — if, considering that New Orleans was disproportionately black compared to most North American cities, racism had played a role. After all, those who had so loudly proclaimed that they were pro–life in March, when the life of one white woman with PVS was on the line, seemed strangely silent when many thousands of black Americans were drowning or their homes were being destroyed in a major flood.

In more than two centuries, Americans have seldom re–elected a president who has already served a full four–year term. Whenever they have done so, whether by a wide margin or a slim one, there is a strange phenomenon that seems to occur. The very act of re–electing a president who was elected in his own right seems to be perceived as an endorsement of the public's collective wisdom.

And that, in turn, seems to produce a reservoir of good will for the president, even among those who voted against him. Maybe that is what Bush was talking about when he said he had earned political capital.

If so, I believe he — and Congress, although Congress seldom gets good marks from the public, no matter which party is in the majority — used up most of it with partisan and transparently political actions in the Schiavo case. And, like the budget surplus that Bush inherited from the Clinton administration and then wantonly squandered before the September 11 terrorist attacks, it was gone when he really needed it.

Starting on this day in 2005, I believe Bush irretrievably lost the public's support and laid the foundation for Republican electoral defeats in the next two elections.

It may have been the most rapid decline in public support for a president who had just been re–elected in American history.

The View of Katrina and Bush

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Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stopped by "The View" on ABC the other day.

One of the things Rice did was defend the Bush administration's actions following Hurricane Katrina.

"I don't think that anybody at any level of government was really prepared for something of Katrina's size and scope," Rice told the panel. Maybe so. It's hard to argue against the fact that Katrina was clearly the costliest hurricane to strike the United States. It was also one of the five deadliest hurricanes in American history.

But one of the things that people expect from the federal government is to be prepared for emergencies. If the administration wasn't prepared for Hurricane Katrina, I don't believe — as some have suggested — that it was due to racial prejudice. I'm inclined to believe that it was incompetence — combined with the shortage of National Guardsmen. Far too many had been pressed into duty in Iraq, leaving far too few to respond to domestic emergencies.

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Everyone had several days' advance warning that Katrina was on the way. There was plenty of lead time.

And, if the government wasn't prepared for Katrina, the criticism that came its way in the days that followed seemed to prompt a determination not to be caught with its pants down the next time. The feds didn't have to wait long. Less than a month later, Hurricane Rita — a Category 5 storm — caused $11.3 billion in damage (compared to more than $80 billion caused by Katrina) and far fewer casualties.

Rita's toll may have been less because it didn't strike a metropolitan area like New Orleans. Those in the Bush administration might argue that they were better prepared for it. We may never know for sure. Attention was soon diverted to Bush's ill-advised — and ultimately unsuccessful — nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.

In years to come, historians may regard Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall as a Category 3 hurricane in the Louisiana-Mississippi region in the early morning hours of Monday, Aug. 29, 2005, as the event that permanently turned the majority of Americans against George W. Bush — and indefinitely turned the Republican Party into a minority party.