The Center Cannot Hold

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"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

William Butler Yeats
"The Second Coming," written in 1919

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I am reminded of Yeats' apocalyptic poem — written 90 years ago, in the immediate aftermath of World War I — after reading an intriguing column by David Brooks in the New York Times.

Brooks, who calls himself a "moderate-conservative," writes that, while there are things that moderates like about the Obama administration's direction, there are aspects that give moderates pause.

"Uh Oh — He Lost David Brooks," says the headline on Jennifer Rubin's entry at Contentions, Commentary magazine's blog. Does it necessarily follow, logically, that, because Brooks has the audacity to ask questions, Obama "lost" his support?

Rubin writes that this defection, if you want to call it that, is "not quite LBJ losing Walter Cronkite on the Vietnam War," but it may be bad enough. Indeed, it may be, if Obama and his true-blue supporters are not open-minded enough to recognize this for what it is.

Some on the left say the stimulus package was too small and that the administration was too concerned with bipartisanship. Some on the right say it was too much.

Those on the left, who now hold the balance of power in this country, accuse those who disagree with them of being racists because the president is black (well, actually, biracial). This is a case of playing the race card. It is similar, in many ways, to the tactic used by those on the right, when they held power a few years ago and accused those who disagreed with them of not being patriotic enough. That was the patriot card.

Neither card is justified except in extreme circumstances. They are used, it seems to me, to obscure uncomfortable problems and thoughtful questions. The fact that someone finds fault in some of Obama's proposals does not make that person racist, just as the fact that someone expressed concerns about the wisdom of invading Iraq did not make that person unpatriotic.

I do not mean to suggest that some of Obama's critics are not racists, nor do I mean that some of those who opposed the invasion of Iraq were not unpatriotic. But they are/were the exceptions to the rule. And those negative labels are/were applied by a mob mentality instead of trying to answer serious questions that had been raised.

The outrage that has been expressed recently about a cartoon in the New York Post and a book display at a Barnes & Noble in Florida is merely the tip of the iceberg, like the outrage that was aimed at French fries during the hysteria of the patriot card a few years ago. They are mere symbols, and, as George Carlin once said, I prefer to leave symbols to the symbol-minded.

Just as it was when the patriot card was being played, those of us in the center feel that important issues are being swept under the rug.

Not everyone looks at things through the alarming prisms of unemployment and foreclosure. The majority of Americans continue to live lives of apparent security. They go to work each day for the same employer whose paychecks have kept food on their tables for many years. They sleep under the same roofs that have kept them safe and dry for those same years.

They may not realize it, but they are the fortunate ones. Nevertheless, their security can be gone in the wink of an eye, like the hundreds of thousands of people who perished in the tsunami the day after Christmas in 2004.

I consider myself a centrist. And I have wondered about many of the things that Brooks writes about in his column. It isn't that I disagree with many of the proposals. But I vacillate between wondering if we aren't trying to do too much too soon (and spending too much to do it) and wondering if we're doing enough to address the urgent problems posed by the recession.

If one does not speak constantly in glowing terms about Obama, does that make that person a racist? No. Does that make me a racist? Hardly. Does that mean Obama has "lost" me? Hardly. It means I have questions that, to this point, have not been answered.

In fact, the liberal frenzy over Obama often reminds me of the conservative frenzy of the 1980s, when having a hero to love (Reagan) required the existence of an enemy to hate.

When people can no longer feel free to ask questions in America, this is no longer the America in which I was brought up. It is an alien land.

I heard on the radio yesterday that saving is up. That would have been good news a few years ago, but today it means that people are saving their money instead of spending it, which will not help revive the economy. Consumer spending is the fuel of the economy.

If consumers are not spending, employers have no reason to hire more workers. Indeed, they have even more reason to let workers go. It is not racist for the unemployed to wonder how they can find work as long as economic conditions are killing off jobs, not creating them. If you need more evidence of this, just wait until this Friday, when the latest jobless report comes out. It is a vicious downward spiral that will not stop until those who are still employed put aside their fears and put some of their money into circulation. What is the government doing to encourage this?

I'd like to see the folks on the left working with the folks on the right to solve the problems that threaten not just this country but the rest of the world. Everything is interconnected. But we can't fix everything at once, and, as Yeats warned, "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."

And the center surely will not hold as long as the left and the right insist on pointing fingers at each other.

Crossing the Lines on Race and Gender

In the Orange County Register, John Ziegler makes an interesting comparison between the behavior of the first black star athlete in golf, Tiger Woods, and the first serious black presidential candidate, Barack Obama.

After acknowledging that "Woods technically is more Asian than black and Obama is as white as he is black," Ziegler points out that "there are stark differences in the way that Tiger Woods and Barack Obama have approached the issue of race in their careers."

One should read the column in its entirety, but essentially it points out that Woods' reaction to racial references by others is more mature now than it was 10 years ago -- when he was younger and inexperienced and still under the guidance of his father.

Today, Woods' father (who, in Ziegler's words, "was known to be far more militant on racial issues" than his son) has been deceased for nearly two years, and Woods essentially brushes off perceived racial slights that might have provoked more of a response when Earl Woods was alive.

(In Earl's defense, he was born in the Great Depression, orphaned in his teen years, and received a baseball scholarship to Kansas State University, where he was a racial pioneer, breaking the conference's "color barrier" in 1951. Pioneers have to have thick skins -- and they tend to be less tolerant than those who come later. That comes, I suppose, from not having the luxury of standing on someone else's shoulders but instead having to stand on your own two feet, however shaky they -- or the ground beneath them -- may be.)

Not so with Obama.

A good case in point is the recent handling of Geraldine Ferraro, herself a groundbreaking vice presidential nominee for the Democrats 24 years ago. Ferraro asserted that Obama, who has served slightly more than half of his six-year term as U.S. senator, would not be in the position he is in if not for the fact that he is black.

On the subject of experience, it can be argued that Ferraro herself probably wouldn't have qualified for a spot on a national ticket in 1984 if not for a characteristic over which she had no control -- her gender.

At the time, she had never been a candidate for statewide office in New York (she did seek the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate twice in the 1990s -- both times unsuccessfully. And it can be further argued that she might never have been in the position to run for the Senate if she had not been on the national ticket in 1984).

Before 1978, Ferraro's career consisted of service as a teacher, lawyer and member of the Queens County District Attorney's Office (a non-elective post).

She was elected to the House of Representatives in 1978 and re-elected in 1980 and 1982 before Walter Mondale chose her to be his running mate in 1984. (In a truly revealing political cartoon of the day, Mondale was shown standing next to a Ferrari with F-E-R-R-A-R-O written on it and saying "Just think of the chicks I'll get with this!")

The idea was that Ferraro's presence on the ticket would help Mondale bridge the perceived "gender gap" in American politics, but the eventual results failed to demonstrate either the existence of such a gap or Ferraro's ability to swing votes to the Democrats because of it. Incumbent President Ronald Reagan was re-elected easily, carrying 49 states and receiving nearly 59% of the popular vote.

Anyway, this week Ferraro resigned her post with Hillary Clinton's finance committee after being criticized by Obama's campaign for her remarks. Ferraro's resignation apparently was voluntary. "I feel terrible for the fact that Hillary is stuck in this thing," Ferraro told the New York Times. "Why put her in that position?"

The day after Ferraro's resignation, the New York Times ran an article in which Patrick Healy and Jeff Zeleny reported, "[Obama] said he was puzzled at how, after more than a year of campaigning, race and sex are at the forefront as never before."

Puzzled?

Obama may have been puzzled, but the Times reporters weren't. They went on to observe that "race, as well as sex, have been unavoidable subtexts of the Democratic campaign since the two candidates began seeking to be the first African-American or the first woman to lead a party’s presidential ticket. In the primaries and caucuses this winter, too, Mrs. Clinton has enjoyed substantial support from women, while Mr. Obama has increasingly drawn overwhelming votes from blacks."

And the racial divide has never been as pronounced, perhaps, as it was in Tuesday's primary. Mississippi, "a state where the electorate has historically been racially polarized, generated one of the most divided votes," the Times observed. "Mrs. Clinton received 8% of the black vote, and Mr. Obama received 26% of the white vote, according to exit polls by Edison/Mitofsky for The Associated Press and television networks."

This nation has been electing presidents since 1788. Constitutional amendments gave blacks the right to vote nearly 80 years later and gave women the right to vote in 1920. Only one Democratic or Republican candidate for vice president (Ferraro) was not male, and none of the candidates for president were black or female.

In this country women have won Senate seats and governor's offices, and they continue to hold them in many states. Blacks have won considerably fewer Senate seats, less than a handful (including the one Obama holds). And, if New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer resigns as he has said he will next week, his successor will be only the fourth black governor in American history.

But this year, the Democratic candidate for president will be black or female.

And, as the campaign drags on longer than most people ever anticipated, the rhetoric becomes more heated on both sides.

That's appropriate, I guess. Harry Truman, who liked to say "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen," called the presidency "the hottest kitchen on earth." So it's only fitting that those who want to occupy it for the next four years should be subjected to some of the heat now.

But, after all, it's only March 15. The Democratic convention in Denver won't be held until August. There's a lot of time left to resolve this.

For that matter, Mondale's nomination still wasn't mathematically clinched after the 1984 primaries had concluded in June. But, by the time the convention was held the next month, he had secured the support of enough delegates to wrap it up. He even announced Ferraro's selection about a week before the convention -- much earlier than nominees tended to do prior to that time.

Maybe Naftali Bendavid of the Chicago Tribune has the answer. The party, Bendavid suggests, needs a Yoda -- an elder statesman to resolve the issue.

You can't turn to the most recent Democratic president for that, though. He's married to one of the candidates, and I guess you could say that represents a conflict of interest.

But a political scientist from Iowa State University threw some cold water on the "elder statesman" notion, anyway.

"Even if there were a group of party heavyweights," the political scientist told Bendavid, "their choice would most likely be John Edwards, and not the two exciting but risky front-runners."