By Artur Davis, on Thu Aug 1, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET Having had the ill-timing of criticizing Barack Obama’s limited reactions to the Zimmerman trial at precisely the moment he was making extended comments on the subject, I’ll add a few updated thoughts, some tough on Obama, some equally tough on conservatives.
First, I read Obama’s 16 minutes on race not so much historically (the Jeremiah Wright speech was substantially more decisive to his career, and the entirely peaceful, mostly civil furor over the verdict does not begin to compare to the drama around either Lyndon Johnson’s “We shall overcome” epic a few days after Selma, or John Kennedy’s masterpiece the night after George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door) but as a pretty fair brief for what he does and does not bring to the national debate. When engaged, the president ratifies the convictions of his admirers and the roughly half of the country that sees the world as he does compellingly, more so than any public figure not named Bill Clinton. Given that successful politicians need to keep their base inspired, that’s no small thing.
But what Obama has been perpetually unable to do is to break down the resistance of Americans who don’t share his worldview. He has, in fact, no history of shifting public opinion on any single cause he adopts: from health care, to immigration reform, to expanded gun background checks, to tougher climate change regulations. Obama’s defenders aren’t off-base in their insistence that he has the misfortune of presiding during a hyper-partisan time, but that excuse seems to conveniently wish away Obama’s 2008 rationale that he was singularly equipped to reverse that same polarization.
So, the responses to even Obama’s best speeches disconcertingly resemble the old split screens after the OJ Simpson acquittal a generation ago: rapture on one side, stone cold indifference or hostility on the other. It does not help that from a hard tactical perspective, Obama has not been adept at the Clintonian maneuver of telling tough truths to his base that build credibility across the divide. Instead, he has taken the easy route of addressing black on black crime in the context of gun availability but rarely through the larger prism of young men devaluing their neighbors and themselves to the point of making violence routine. He has infrequently, at least since his 2008 Philadelphia speech on race, evoked the mutual recriminations between blacks and whites that are so pervasive that they have degraded casual language and can ever so often still produce fatal outcomes. For instance, I’m in the camp that thinks something like this circle of shared hostility is really the proximate cause in Sanford, Florida that turned suspicious looks into words, and that segued into a confrontation that ended in death.
 But whatever Obama’s inadequacies as a national persuader, conservatives are wrong to dismiss Obama’s talk as just so much “divisiveness” or “race-baiting”, to pick out a few choice adjectives. It’s a revealing error of judgment, though: to see Obama’s observations about the persistence of racial indignities as something unduly provocative is to purchase a myth much too common on the political right—that racial limitations are nothing more than a proxy for something else, perhaps class or educational differences, and that stressing over discrimination is just a liberal wedge tactic. While, as Gallup just documents, well below a majority of blacks describe bias as the most significant obstacle they face, the number who genuinely believe race has vanished altogether as an impediment is infinitesimal, well below the roughly 900,000 or so African Americans who voted for Mitt Romney. The evidence against too pollyannish a thesis on race is sweeping, from surveys documenting the large numbers of whites who harbor stunningly stereotypical views of blacks on subjects ranging from intelligence to work ethic, to the rickety foundations black owned businesses enjoy even when they are propped up with government loans, to astonishingly low numbers of blacks on some of the most prestigious fast tracks in America (elite law firm partnerships, Wall St brokerage firms, senior leadership at Fortune 500 firms to signal out a few).
The right’s tendency to embrace too sanguine a view of race, and to brush off consternation over profiling and stop and frisk as the lament of professional activists, may actually be the single most intractable reason why Republicans fall flat with parts of the black population who are affluent enough that their security doesn’t depend on Obamacare, welfare, food stamps or some other element of the safety net. And the fact that a good chunk of the conservative base is resistant to the notion that there are institutional barriers that flow from those cultural suspicions of blacks has opened a blind spot: precious few on the political right are willing to update their vision to contain reforms that might alleviate some of those burdens, or to acknowledge the reductions of those burdens as a price of restoring a freer market and a more cohesive culture.
Read the rest of…
Artur Davis: What Conservatives Need To Take From Obama’s Race Speech
By Jonathan Miller, on Wed Jul 24, 2013 at 8:00 AM ET One of the true treats of the Facebook revolution — in addition to reconnecting with old friends — is the birthday tradition of being flooded by well-wishes from my motley collection of virtual friends.
There isn’t really anything that special about turning 46 — just part of my long, slow march from 40 to 50; but as the old saying goes, aging another year is by far better than the alternative.
So in the spirit of the new age of narcissism facilitated by social media, I want to use this opportunity of the virtual birthday attention for a bit of shameless self-promotion. And I can excuse myself for the indulgence because I want to remind my friends of a very important cause — and urge them to join me.
Yep, in lieu of birthday presents, my wish is for you to click here and join the growing, vital No Labels citizen army.
===
 A little over three years ago, I first joined a few handfuls of leading Democrats, Republicans and Independents to launch No Labels, a grassroots organization dedicated to promoting bi-partisan problem-solving instead of the hyper-partisan paralysis that is American politics.
I have to admit, while I was hopeful and passionate, I was still skeptical that we would be able to accomplish anything significant in the short term.
I have never been more proud to say: I was wrong.
Last week, I joined with my fellow co-founders, and 81 Congressmen who have signed up to be No Labels’ problem solvers — YES THAT’S 81 DEMOCRATIC, REPUBLICAN, AND INDEPENDENT SENATORS AND MEMBERS OF CONGRESS — at a lively rally involving 1000 supporters (on a cruelly hot Washington summer day) and announcing our new substantive policy plan to “Make Government Work.”
Read about “Make Government Work” here.
If you like what you read, follow this link to contact your Congressman and Senators to urge them to support our agenda and join our problem solvers group (or thank them if they already are part of the team.)
The country’s political system is broken. But No Labels now offers you a real opportunity to change that. Please join us.
And if I can get just a few of my friends to join us, or convince a few No Labels members to contact their Congressmen with our new agenda, it will be a very productive 46th birthday.
By Michael Steele, on Tue Jul 23, 2013 at 1:30 PM ET From Tal Kopan of Politico:
Michael Steele on Wednesday said Liz Cheney’s decision to challenge fellow Republican Sen. Mike Enzi for his Wyoming Senate seat will be disastrous and split the party.
The former Republican National Committee chairman told MSNBC’s Alex Wagner that he thinks former Sen. Alan Simpson was right to call the situation a “disaster.”
“I think he’s right, I think it’s going to open a lot of fissures in the party. I think this is an insurgent move by Cheney,” Steele said Wednesday on “Now with Alex Wagner.”
Steele criticized Cheney’s comments that Enzi has compromised too much and “gone along to get along.”
“When have people gone along to get along in Washington in the last four or five years?” Steele said. “This is clearly more of a personal opportunity to, thinking there’s an opening here, and, you know, it’s going to be tough.”
Agreeing with fellow panelist E.J. Dionne, Steele said he hopes race is a chance for rank and file Republicans to fight back against a Washington tea party.
“I hope they do. I hope the Enzi team really come prepared with a strong A game, because this could be a seminal moment for a longer conversation,” Steele said.
Click here to read full piece.
By Artur Davis, on Tue Jul 23, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET Barack Obama’s initial banalities on the George Zimmerman trial—sympathy for the loss Trayvon Martin’s parents suffered, respect for the jury process—felt tepid and his observation today that Trayvon Martin could have been Obama 15 years ago felt cliched. Revealingly, to some of Obama’s fans, the pedestrian response was strategic given that Obama’s ventures into race during his presidency, from the flap over a black Harvard professor being arrested outside his home to his observation last year that an Obama son might have resembled Trayvon, have backfired. In the suggestion of the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson, given that track record, better the power of his family’s example when they walk across the White House lawn than any risky but more textured contribution to this week’s exposed wounds on race.
Of course, cheerleading about the role model value of a black man in high places has never been a thing that black commentators have embraced for its own sake, at least not when it involves the face of a Republican or even a black Democrat who was insufficiently progressive. And to lower expectations for Obama to the point that saying little is deemed more beneficial than saying much concedes one of the central premises for why a lightly experienced politician five years from a state senate seat was elevated so quickly to the presidency. It is also another instance of a second term where Obama ranges from spectator to occasional sideline critic on the domestic priorities of his own government: on immigration reform and expanded gun background checks, on the renewal of No Child Left Behind, on second tier fights over food stamps and student loans, the formula has been standard partisan ripostes after the fact and an avoidance of any mobilizing strategy that lasts beyond a morning news cycle.
 So, in the vacuum Obama leaves, either an Attorney General with a hapless profile who is obscure to most white Americans, or a set of voices who have been punch lines for about a decade, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, have been ill-cast as the spokesmen for one view of the Florida verdict—that Martin is not atypical but a specter of myriad ways young black men are devalued—and the very staleness of their advocacy has been easy fodder for critics on the right who are too sanguine about the reality that astonishingly few blacks have confidence in the race neutrality of the legal system.
It is not hard to imagine what Obama might have done this week. He certainly could have lamented the most overlooked aspect of the trial, that Zimmerman and Martin very likely profiled each other, that each saw a threat and affront magnified by the other’s color, and that the ugliness of that kind of mutual recrimination too regularly spills over into every facet of black and white interaction. At the same time, there has been a need this week for the African American community to self-examine the sizable inconsistency between the elevation of a child killed by a white man into a cause célèbre and the national anonymity of, say, Hadiya Pendleton, the black majorette killed by a stray gang bullet a week after performing in Obama’s inaugural parade: couldn’t Obama have made that point more powerfully than, say, a conservative commentator like Rich Lowry, or Zimmerman’s brother on CNN, if the president’s vision of his leadership had only led him to try?
Read the rest of…
Artur Davis: Obama’s Inadequacies on Race
By Jeff Smith, on Fri Jul 19, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET  Q. I work as a body man for an elected official who recently told me that I am in his “circle of trust,” which was, he said, why he decided to place me in such a sensitive job. A few days later he directed me to call the scheduler to cancel a midday appearance, and instead had me drive him to an apartment building. He disappeared for an hour and then came back. The next week he did it again. Yesterday he asked me to do it for a third time despite the fact that he would be missing a big event we’d discussed in staff meetings. Before calling HQ, I said, “Yes, sir, but isn’t this a pretty important event?” He replied, “Last time I checked, you were my driver, not my campaign manager.” So far we’ve been able to reschedule some things, but the point is, I am feeling pretty uncomfortable, especially since he is married. What is your advice?
—No name, no location, please
This is a tough predicament, and I’m sorry you’re dealing with it. You have three choices, as I see it.
- Explain to the campaign manager what is happening, without any editorializing or speculation. It may be that he/she is already aware of the issue, but you could probably shed some more light.
- Tell the principal you are concerned about his behavior. Don’t accuse him of infidelity, but say that people on staff are starting to ask questions about the frequent cancellations and suggest that they should stop.
- Quit.
According to Mark Halperin and John Heilemann’s Game Change, John Edwards’ body guy tried Option #2, but when that didn’t change Edwards’ behavior, went to Option #1, which resulted in something like Option #3: He was summarily fired by an angry Edwards, who accused him of tattling.
Really, the point here isn’t that he’s cheating on his wife (although that’s troubling and could hurt the campaign); the point is that he’s cheating on the campaign. What he does in his personal life is no one’s business, but wasting a staffer’s time and using campaign time to get off when he should be getting votes or money? That’s unforgivable.
My overall thought: This won’t end well. With his “last time I checked” comment, the principal indicated his probable reaction if confronted, so that approach is unlikely to work. Going to the campaign manager might change the principal’s behavior but may cost you your job—at least your job as body guy—and your chances for upward mobility in this organization. So unless you are absolutely convinced that the principal is going to change the world as a public servant and that outweighs your discomfort, I’d suggest you start looking for other gigs. If you do decide to address the issue directly with the principal before making a final decision to quit, remember that doing so could make it impossible to use him (or other staff ) as a reference.
Q. I worked for a congressman who had a rule not to eat at events so he could talk and shake hands. Not wanting to be rude, he made me grab a plate in his place. So at every event I had a plate of food that I enthusiastically praised and enjoyed. After four events per day not only was I full but I was getting incredibly fat. How did you balance your campaign and your eating habits?
—C.W., Silver Spring, Md.
I may not be the best person to ask here: When my congressional campaign ended, I weighed 107 lbs. (at 5’6’’). But yes, you gotta eat something at events, especially in ethnic communities. The symbolism is powerful. However, that doesn’t mean you have to eat an entire plate. Remember when you were 5 and you tried to spread veggies across your plate to make it look as if you ate more than you actually did? If you are adroit on the front end, you can look as if you are helping yourself to a healthy portion. And no one ever said you couldn’t discreetly deposit your plate on a table before leaving. Just don’t throw it out—someone might see that. Also, work out. Given the stress and terrible food of campaigns, campaign aides should work out daily both for your physical and mental health, even if it’s just push-ups or pull-ups at lunch.
Read the rest of…
Jeff Smith: Do As I Say — A Political Advice Column
By Jonathan Miller, on Thu Jul 18, 2013 at 2:00 PM ET  A little over three years ago, I first joined a few handfuls of leading Democrats, Republicans and Independents to launch No Labels, a grassroots organization dedicated to promoting bi-partisan problem-solving instead of the hyper-partisan paralysis that is American politics.
I have to admit, while I was hopeful and passionate, I was still skeptical that we would be able to accomplish anything significant in the short term.
I have never been more proud to say: I was wrong.
Today, I joined with my fellow co-founders, and 81 Congressmen who have signed up to be No Labels’ problem solvers — YES THAT’S 81 DEMOCRATIC, REPUBLICAN, AND INDEPENDENT SENATORS AND MEMBERS OF CONGRESS — at a lively rally involving 1000 supporters (on a cruelly hot Washington summer day) and announcing our new substantive policy plan to “Make Government Work.”
Read about “Make Government Work” here.
If you like what you read, follow this link to contact your Congressman and Senators to urge them to support our agenda and join our problem solvers group (or thank them if they already are part of the team.)
And check out this FRONT PAGE article from today’s The New York Times:
There do appear to be new stirrings of cooperation — or at least the desire to cooperate. On Thursday, the staunchly bipartisan group No Labels and 81 House and Senate lawmakers — some of the most liberal and conservative — will roll out a slate of specific legislative proposals with broad and surprising support across the ideological spectrum.
Odd couples like Representatives Cory Gardner, the Colorado Republican who was swept to the House in the 2010 Tea Party wave, and Peter Welch, a liberal Democrat from Vermont, will team on actual legislation, not statements of ideals, colored lapel ribbons or promises to sit together at State of the Union addresses.
Senators who embraced Tuesday’s agreement to call off filibusters of executive-branch nominees promised this week to extend the spirit of compromise to more whole-Senate gatherings, retreats, budget negotiations and other vexing legislative matters. Seven senators, four Democrats and three Republicans, unveiled legislation on Wednesday to offer legal protection to journalists ensnared in leak investigations.
“As a prosecutor, I don’t like to use the word ‘gang,’ but it’s another big ‘gang’ we have here,” said Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota.
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said a group was forming to try to reverse the automatic across-the-board spending cuts before they do more damage next fiscal year.
But beyond those pledges of bonhomie, the institutional impediments to progress remain unchanged, especially in the Senate.
Indeed, the deal to head off the filibuster-rule change nearly derailed 24 hours after it was struck when Thomas E. Perez, President Obama’s nominee to be labor secretary, squeaked past a Senate filibuster by a single vote on Wednesday afternoon, 60 to 40.
The Republican Senators John McCain of Arizona, the architect of the filibuster deal; Lamar Alexander and
Bob Corker of Tennessee; Mark Steven Kirk of Illinois; and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska saved the nominee — and the supposedly growing spirit of bipartisanship.
“Right now the only people who are empowered are the obstructionists,” said Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, who in 2005 joined 13 other senators to thwart an effort to end filibusters of judicial nominees but was ready to back the move to end filibusters of executive nominations this round. “And for the rest of us, the power we should be wielding on behalf of our constituents is virtually nil,” she said. “Something has to be done.”
Since Democrats began threatening action to neuter the filibuster, critics have warned that simple majority votes in the Senate would make that chamber like the House, where the majority rules absolutely. But with a 60-vote threshold in the Senate, the minority party tends to rule absolutely on any issue lacking overwhelming bipartisan support.
That is because only the largest gang can muster 60 votes, and a premium is placed on leadership loyalty in the minority party.
In a closely drawn Senate, where neither party commands much of a majority, just two or three senators from either party can band together to stop legislation from garnering 51 votes, or to push compromise bills over the finish line.
“It doesn’t take 51 votes to get something done,” Mr. Lieberman said. “It takes two or three people to get together to form the 51.”
In the House, where loyalty to leadership has been dominant, such bipartisan gangs are almost unheard of.
That is why Thursday’s No Labels event could signify a real change.
The agenda of these “Problem Solver” lawmakers is modest: adopting two-year budgets instead of the annual and barely functioning one-year budget process; ridding the government of duplicative programs; merging the electronic health records of the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs; cutting federal agency travel budgets in half; and commissioning private companies to reduce federal energy costs, then paying them from the savings they extract.
But with 81 members, 73 from the House, 35 of those Republican, the group is actually reaching a critical mass if it can stay together.
“This is about finding narrow slivers where conservatives and liberals can get together,” said Representative Mick Mulvaney, a conservative Republican from South Carolina and a member of the Problem Solvers group. “You can’t run before you walk. You have to build up trust.”
Those coalitions could be a mark of the personal frustration that even members of Republican leadership say they feel.
“It’s important the American people realize not everyone is up here to score political points,” said Representative Lynn Jenkins of Kansas, a member of the Republican leadership. “We’re trying to find common ground.”
Lawmakers “are pretty depressed about it,” Mr. Welch said.
“Nothing can get done,” he went on. “You have to go to work knowing you’re not going to accomplish anything through the legislative process, and that’s a pretty tough place to be for a legislative body.”
By John Y. Brown III, on Thu Jul 18, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET I love people watching. And engaging in subtle people interaction.
On the streets of NYC, there are lots of confident accomplished people. They just look they are someone important. They know it and we do too. They may even be celebrities. Of course, only a tiny percentage can be real public celebrities, whatever that is. But we tend to look for celebrities and famous people instinctively. And many on the workaday streets of NYC are happy to invite speculation that they are, indeed, a little more special than others walking to either side of them.
Today alone walking on the streets of NYC for several hours I saw –or thought I saw– George Clooney, Jamie Foxx (twice), Kurt Vonnegut (even though he died a few years back, but not his visage in NYC), George Peppard, George Ross (the elder general counsel and senior adviser to Donald Trump on the Apprentice), Kelly Rupa (3 times) and possibly Elliot Spitzer (although I’m pretty sure he was in Albany today), and finally at least three business execs who looked like no celebrity in particular but carried themselves like they had been (or should have been) featured on this month’s cover of Fortune Magazine. Or GQ. Sometimes it’s hard to tell those two types apart.
I’ve made up a sort of game I’m enjoying playing. When I see one of the “special looking” people of the streets of NYC—-the ones with a certain sheen and air about them who look like they are ready at that moment to be snapped by paparazzi— I make eye contact with them in a knowing and ingratiating way as if to say, “Oh my gosh. I know who you are!”
 People really like it. Even though they know they aren’t the real celebrity I am confusing them with, they feel, deep down, like they could be. And maybe should be. And may even suspect they have a few things on their celebrity look alike but just didn’t get the same breaks.
It’s endearing and believable for us both. And leaves us both feeling a bit better. One of us is being admired and the other is thrilled to see someone special.
But today I began throwing in a new twist.
I look them in the eye again– a bit more seriously and solemnly as if to say, “You do remember me, don’t you?”
This all happens in just a few seconds. But it’s an amazing back and forth of communication and information. All expressed in the eyes and a few subtle facial gestures.
Sometimes the person being thought a celebrity will play along as if we somehow really do know each other in some tangential way and sort of tips his or her hat as if to say, “G’day.” Others are a little confused and withdraw. Or disengage. Still others play into the whole game either knowingly or unknowingly. But are happy to be engaged –either as a game or fantasy.
This new twist adds an extra layer of positive reinforcement. Now both individuals have been suspected of being someone special and having a special sort of bond to the other. And even having had a pleasant exchange.
Which made me wonder: Is it a game I am playing? Is it a fantasy? Does it have to be either one? Maybe….and I’m being serious here….we should look at all people in this way. As special and having a connection in some way to us and having a pleasant, albeit perfunctory, exchange.
Why not?
Why not?
By Artur Davis, on Thu Jul 18, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET Thomas Edsall’s column on the South’s racially polarized politics is so many clichés—the notion that thinly disguised bigots are astride the region’s Republican Party, that they have meanly pushed black state legislators to the margins, that they are presiding over some modern reign of terror on the black and poor, and that the Supreme Court has just made it fundamentally worse by setting aside a major provision of the Voting Rights Act.
But he is not wrong about a premise that lurks throughout his argument: more than any place in America today, the South is a zone where ideology and party do correlate almost entirely with racial identity. Measured against the backdrop of a national electorate where Barack Obama actually exceeded four of the last five Democratic presidential performances with whites, the South’s “white equals Republican” reality is jarring. To a disconcerting degree, routine ideological debate over spending priorities, education, and voting requirements turn into a perpetual argument over whether the intent of every policy is to disadvantage minorities. It’s a stultifying kind of environment.
At the risk of repetition, I’ll mention one more time that liberal critics like Edsall miss the perverse contributions that racially gerrymandered districts have made to the marginalization of black political interests: by guaranteeing that black voters are cordoned off into their own singular political communities and have only a marginal presence elsewhere, courts have ensured that those interests will never really be elevated outside black voting precincts. And the meme that it is malicious Republicans who have driven those gerrymandering trends ignores altogether the extent to which African-American Democrats and federal courts have sanctioned, actually demanded, those district lines.
It’s also worth reiterating another observation I have made in these pages. The Democrats whose fortunes have declined so precipitously in the region since 2008 are still only recently out of power in the Deep South, at least at the legislative level, and have a mixed to poor record of alleviating a range of sins Edsall and most liberals complain about, from tax systems that over-burden the working class, to bargain basement Medicaid programs, to thin levels of social services, to weak environmental protections.
To be sure, southern Republicans can go depressingly tone deaf in their choice of priorities, from North Carolina’s rollback of criminal procedure protections in a state where weak employment is surely something more voters are fixated on, to Alabama’s meat-ax approach to illegal immigration, to the lack of GOP support in most of these states for the kind comprehensive education reform that might boost the region’s abysmal rankings in data that measure the quality of life for children. And yes, the South certainly lacks its share of imaginative, Mitch Daniel type Republicans who see entrenched poverty as the kind of dilemma conservative ought to be engaged in addressing.
But to the extent that minority southerners are, in Edsall’s terms, “hindered from shaping the policies that determine social and economic mobility and the overall quality of life”, the reasons are more complex than the cause effect that Edsall suggests. The solutions have as much to do with ending a bipartisan accommodation to special interests that are averse to cutting edged innovations as they do with taking Republicans to task. Of course, had Democrats not squandered capital on expanding casinos, and soft-pedaling clear-cut evidence of corruption within their own ranks, they might well have found a high ground that stanched their bleeding with at least suburban, educated whites who might be receptive to a progressive platform. And if the all too recent Democratic rule over southern legislatures had really produced the “New South” that Edsall and others are claiming is under siege, he might have a moral point rather than a partisan political one.
By Jonathan Miller, on Tue Jul 16, 2013 at 3:30 PM ET If want to know first all of the day’s developments about the hottest 2014 campaign in the country, and you haven’t yet subscribed to The RP’s KY Political Brief – prepared every weekday morning by wunderkind Bradford Queen with links to all of the day’s Kentucky political news — WHAT’S A MATTA WIT YOU?!?! Click here to subscribe FOR FREE!
You can’t turn on a news channel these days without hearing from some screaming head, yelling to us about Washington obstruction.
Whether you agree with those who argue that the Republican minority in the Senate is obstructing progress, or those who believe they are saving a broken system from doing further harm, there are 3 options for you:
1. Ditch Mitch: For those frustrated with Senator Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s tactics and want to see his 30th year in the U.S. Senate be his last, get involved in defeating him. Click here to support Alison Lundergan Grimes’ campaign for the U.S. Senate, or click here to support the Kentucky Democratic party’s grassroots efforts.
2. Help Mitch: If your main problem is what Obama is doing to the country, one way of stopping his agenda is to support one of his main antagonists on Capitol Hill — Mitch McConnell. Click here to support McConnell’s re-election efforts.
3. Join No Labels: Whether you are Democratic, Republican, or Independent; liberal, conservative or moderate, you are likely fed up with the hyper-partisan paralysis in Washington. There’s finally an organization for us that wants our leaders to stop fighting and start fixing. Click here to join our growing army.
DO IT NOW!
By Lauren Mayer, on Tue Jul 16, 2013 at 3:00 PM ET Having taken on the challenge of writing a new political comedy song every week, as well as writing songs regularly for children’s music publishers, I am regularly confronted with the question of from whence comes the kernel of inspiration. Or in less high-falutin’ terms, “oh crap, what am I gonna write this week?” But that’s sort of the point of these regular challenges, seeing how we respond to the regularity. (Such as “Julie and Julia,” how a home-chef blogged about cooking every recipe in Julia Child’s “Mastering French Cooking,” and how it transformed her marriage and made her a media star, or those articles that pop up occasionally in women’s magazines about couples who decide to try having sex every day for a year, only none of them end up getting played by Amy Adams. But I digress . . . )
There are those who say inspiration flows from a higher power, like in the movie “Amadeus” where Salieri envies Mozart, whom he thinks is basically taking dictation from a divine source. And others say there’s no such thing as pure inspiration, it’s mostly persistence and hard work. Most famous writers will advise their audiences to write what they know, and to write regularly. (When I was in middle school, our class got to attend a lecture by Ray Bradbury, who met with us afterwards, and he detailed his writing method, he got up every day, put his rear end in his chair, and made himself write 10 pages. Sometimes the words flowed effortlessly and became the germ of a new novel, and sometimes he took several hours to write 10 pages of “I hate writing.”)
So when it comes to political comedy songs, of course I start with perusing current events, but usually I still have to do the plant-the-tush-and-force-myself. Sometimes a meme or topic is trending too strongly to ignore, like the 2012 election’s “Binders Full of Women” or the recent flap about Paula Deen (so I at least have a subject matter). But every now and then, a line or a tune will simply pop into my head – not that I claim to be Mozartian with some sort of direct line to divine inspiration, but I do sometimes wonder where that comes from. And this started when I was a kid – in 6th grade, I accompanied Amy Wood and Lori D’Itri in the school talent show, singing the recent hit song “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head.” (Yeah, it was that long ago. Altho I skipped a grade so I was only 10. So I’m not that old.) Anyway, the sheet music listed other titles available from the publisher, including a title that cracked us all up, “I Left My Heart In San Francisco.” We thought that was really weird, and all of a sudden a tune and a lyric popped into my head:
(sung to a jaunty ragtime tune)
“I left my heart in San Francisco,
I left my lungs in Waikiki,
I left my legs in old New Mexico,
And now there’s nothing left of me!” That was the moment I decided to become a songwriter. (And someday it will make a terrific anecdote for a t.v. interview . . . )
I don’t have those moments very often, when a whole section of a song just materializes, but it’s wonderful when it happens. And this week, after reading a slew of articles about the combination of failed attempts at reasonable gun legislation, and the recent spate of state restrictions on abortion, the title and first few lines of this week’s song popped into my head. I imagine the combination of these two sensitive issues will prompt some pretty vehement responses (although so far, the angriest youTube comments I’ve gotten have also been the worst in terms of spelling and grammar, which makes them a little less ominous . . . )
|
The Recovering Politician Bookstore
|
