By Michael Steele, on Fri Dec 6, 2013 at 11:00 AM ET Imprisoned for 27 years because he fought to be equal and free, a man can become bitter, even angry at his jailers and the oppressors they represent. But as Nelson Mandela recalled “As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison.”
For the Mandela family, their loss is personal, but it is a loss shared by a world that has been touched by the quiet strength and fearless determination of Nelson Mandela. While we mourn with them and the people of South Africa, we also celebrate with them the life of a great man.
God blesses us with the precious gift of life. What we do with that gift is the legacy we leave behind.
And what a legacy Mandela has left for us.
He empowered generations of South Africans not just to dream but to do. His vision of equality became a reality for them and a galvanizing force for change for the rest of us.
 Today, South Africa stands taller because it stands on the shoulders of Nelson Mandela.
It is freer because he never wavered in his core belief in the advancement of equality and freedom for its people.
And it is richer because he believed in its possibilities. As Mandela once said “Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another.”
Well done good and faithful servant. Rest in peace Madiba.
(Cross-posted, with permission of the author, from The Grio)
By RP Nation, on Fri Dec 6, 2013 at 10:30 AM ET On a trip to South Africa ten years ago, I read Mandela’s biography prior to arrival.
I visited Robbyn Island and was guided through his cell and activities by a cheerful intelligent man who had been a prisoner with Mandela for 18 years. At the end of the tour, I asked him why he was not angry. His answer was “What good would it do?”
I never forgot it. It was in fact what Mandela represented that anger doesn’t solve problems — that understanding and patience and goodwill towards all does.
What a privilege for all of us to have seen and heard what Mandela was and will always be…a guide to a better world.
Mike Leven is President and Chief Operating Officer of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation
By RP Nation, on Fri Dec 6, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET We had this discussion prematurely, months ago, but the moment has arrived, and Nelson Mandela has passed.
People never leave us, and even while his body will be laid to rest, his soul and his spirit will burn brightly in the hearts of all who, as the prophet Micah taught, “Do righteousness, love mercy, and walk humbly with God.”
May his passion for equality lead us all to share in each other’s blessing.
May his light that still shines brightly help lead us on that path.
By John Y. Brown III, on Fri Dec 6, 2013 at 9:30 AM ET Reposting from July 2013:
Our world seems on the cusp of losing a genuine hero for the ages, Nelson Mandela.
The word hero gets overused a lot but never when applied Mr Mandela, who looks like Morgan Freeman playing God after God has decided to stick around and live among the mortals.
Muhammad Ali famously dismissed achieving the impossible saying “Impossible is nothing.” Nelson Mandela has exemplified that statement throughout his life and continues to do so.
I first heard of this man when I was 20 years old and had the privilege to spend several days in South Africa in 1983. Apartheid, legalized racial discrimination against blacks, was embedded in the nation’s legal system. Nelson Mandela was incarcerated and in poor health. We were taught at the time that he would almost certainly die in prison.
But he didn’t.
Several years later celebrating his 70th birthday while still in prison, Nelson Mandela rallied his people. He became a symbol of patient and peaceful persistence against injustice and a symbol of inspiration much like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King had become resisting injustices in their own countries just decades earlier.
Shortly after that, even though struggling with tuberculosis, Nelson Mandela emerged from prison a free man who not only lived but lived to become the president of his country (and the first black office holder in South African history). Ironically, his country had imprisoned him years earlier for resisting its laws and committing treason and sedition in defying Apartheid in Mandela’s youth. As president Mandela went on to remove the yoke of Apartheid from his country and for all of South Africa’s people.
And today—nearly 30 years after I first heard Mandela’s name whispered as a ghost in the failed resistance to South Africa’s Apartheid policy, he is a living embodiment of everything that was impossible then ….and that his most ardent supporters had stopped believing could ever happen.
How does that happen?
 How does a man physically weak, legally incarcerated, politically written off, sick with a potentially fatal malady and aging into his 70s not give up?
How does that same man emerge in his twilight years and become arguably an even more successful South African version of our nation’s Abraham Lincoln?
I don’t know.
Except that’s the kind of things that real heroes do…..and real heroes are as rare as they are extraordinary. And it’s worth pointing out that one is still alive and in our midst. Although sadly, perhaps not for much longer. But he’s here now.
And we are blessed to be able to acknowledge him, again, while he is still alive. And thank him for teaching us that impossible isn’t always as difficult to overcome as it seems.
By Jonathan Miller, on Fri Dec 6, 2013 at 9:15 AM ET If there was ever a figure that embodied the ideal mission of The Recovering Politician, the world lost him yesterday after his gracing us with his strength, faith. and compassion for more than 95 years.
Indeed, Mandela’s experience makes the absurd 21st century U.S. politicial debate that we’ve discussed ad naseum here — from debt ceiling collapses to fiscal cliff freefalls — seem so miniscule in comparison. This was a man who was the leading force in turning a country from a ruthless, discriminatory apartheid system, into a majority rule democracy, albeit imperfect like all forms of government turn out to be.
But more significantly, once he secured power, he did the impossible: Mandela forgave the white rulers who had imprisoned him, who had tortured and killed so many of his friends, his allies, his people. Mandela’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, chaired by fellow Nobel Peace laureate Desmond Tutu, was perhaps the greatest historical example of a moral value that so many of us try and fail to accomplish — forgiving those who have wronged us, moving forward in a spirit of reconciliation and peace.
Mandela’s example truly embodied the treachings of Jesus, whose challenge to “turn the other cheek” and “love your enemies” are potentially the most difficult religious teachings to truly follow. And as my fellow Jews reflect upon our own transgressions every Yom Kippur — the Day of Atonement, where we are taught that before we can earn God’s forgiveness, we must forgive ourselves and atone to our neighbors — we’d be wise to reflect on Mandela’s historic achievement.
Mandela’s life will be celebrated here at The Recovering Politician with a day and weekend of rememberance. Our contributors will share their thoughts on the man and his legacy. But we are also opening our virtual pages to you, our readers. If you have any thoughts to share, please send them to us at Staff@TheRecoveringPolitician.com. We will be publishing the best of your submissions today and over the weekend.
By Jeff Smith, on Wed Nov 27, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET  Q. I work for a New York state assemblyman who has consistent turnover of attractive female staffers in the office. I recently heard that one reason behind the turnover is that he has slept with more than one of them. At least he’s not married, I guess. Even though it’s not exactly ideal, do you think it is problematic enough that I should leave, or does it sort of come with the territory in politics?
—No name or initials, obviously, New York City
Is this kind of thing more pervasive in politics than elsewhere? Perhaps; as Kissinger said, “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” But that doesn’t make it right. If he’s slept with multiple members of his staff who have then quit or been fired, then yes, this is problematic enough for you to leave.
Do people in supervisory positions occasionally fall in love with subordinates? Sure, and yes, it can be complicated. But if it’s happened multiple times and caused “consistent” turnover (your words), then it’s not a fairy tale connection between principal and aide. It’s a pattern, and one with which you should avoid any association, because politicians (or bosses in any field) whose offices have patterns remotely like this don’t typically have bright futures (see: Filner, Bob).
Q. I work in a charter school in New York City and believe in the mutually beneficial relationship between a public school and its community, though in the charter world that’s hard: We are often treated as outsiders and insurgents. Relatedly, I am very concerned with what happened in the mayoral campaign around charter schools. Eva Moskowitz of Success Academy, with a few other schools, held a rally and march across the Brooklyn Bridge. It was obvious from the media coverage and the way it was discussed internally that the intent was to warn one of the mayoral candidates that opposition to charter schools would be dangerous. My concern, shared by many of my colleagues, is whether such a protest is unethical—or even worse. The organizers seem to have made a point to keep the rally from [using] obvious campaign rhetoric, but it seems that a rally about an issue that has been a source of debate in the campaign, held during a general election period, is inescapably political in the way that bars public schools from participating. The twist, perhaps, is that charter employees are not government employees, unlike district schools’ staff. Our schools’ budgets rely on public funds, yet the workforce is made up of private individuals. The call to action was done during work time; thus, while we were being paid with public dollars, flyers sent home to parents were printed on a copier paid for with tax dollars. I’m curious what you think about both the legality and the ethics of such an action.
—Concerned, New York CityThe narrow legal question is whether the protest organizers acted inappropriately. By using taxpayer resources to engage in political activity during work hours, the answer appears to be yes. (I am not a lawyer, and—for the uninitiated—I violated election law myself a decade ago.)
The broader question relates to this assertion: “[A] rally about an issue that has been a source of debate in the campaign, held during a general election period, is inescapably political in the way that bars public schools from participating.”
I completely disagree. Even if charter school employees were government employees, lots of public employees have interests that are “inescapably political” around which they organize during election season. Have you ever heard of AFGE (a union of federal government workers) or AFSCME (state and local government employees)? Their members don’t take vacations from political organizing because it’s election season. Quite to the contrary, election season finds them at their most active; elections focus the attention of voters, journalists and candidates, so timely activism is savvy. No one—unless their job specifically requires them to refrain from partisan political activity—should be precluded from participating in political activity during election time or any other time. And charter schools in particular—whose very existence hinges upon state law and local regulation—may find employee (and family) mobilization critical to their survival.
By Artur Davis, on Mon Nov 25, 2013 at 3:00 PM ET If you are an American over sixty, you remember when you learned that John F. Kennedy had died. If you are one of my contemporaries—too young to have experienced Kennedy, too old to be a cynic about his aura—you may recall a different snapshot, of the moment you thought Jack Kennedy had been reborn in the form of some youthful contender who could turn an inspirational phrase and stab a finger in the air.
Your moment might seem absurd now: Gary Hart in the glow of winning New Hampshire in 1984. Or bittersweet—the November night in 1992 when Bill Clinton retired the WWII generation. Yours might be agonizingly recent – Barack Obama on a dream-lit stage in Grant Park in 2008. It’s been the longest quest in modern politics, the effort to recreate an ideal of power that was extinguished exactly 50 years ago, and it has never ended well.
Pretenders like Hart imitated the style without Kennedy’s strength of purpose. Clinton, Kennedy’s equal as a tactician, never matched his capacity to lift the country’s moral tone. As for Obama, he has gone steadily backward in terms of his hold on the public’s imagination. Kennedy did the opposite, expanding a one vote per precinct squeaker into the last presidency that never dropped below fifty percent approval.
The consistent take on Kennedy, which Chris Matthews argues in his 2011 book “Elusive Hero” and Thurston Clarke reprises in his recent effort, “JFK’s Last Hundred Days”, is that the late president’s genius was his disdain for conventional wisdom, whether it was about the grip of the decaying boss structure in his party, the permanence of the Cold War, or the rigidity of social barriers like racism. True, as is their assessment that JFK never stopped growing and adjusting to circumstances: he reversed his worst blunder, the Bay of Pigs, with his mastery during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and one doesn’t have to share Clarke’s cherry picked rendition of Kennedy’s last few months to appreciate that the leader who died in Dallas was wiser and more substantial than the image-meister who barely left a footprint in the Senate.
 But Kennedy’s strategic deftness in avoiding war with a country that no longer exists surely is not what resonates with this post-nuclear generation: nor is the hedging on civil rights and Vietnam that kept his popularity intact the quality that frames him as an exemplar of presidential vision. To account for why he still outranks all of his presidential peers in public esteem, to find why a presidency whose early days exist only in black and white newsreel still resonates, requires understanding two other elements of Camelot.
First, Kennedy is the last president who consistently challenged rather than promised. JFK’s successors have outdone themselves in bidding to give us more of what we want – the liberal ones offering more entitlement, the conservatives offering to return more tax dollars to us, or to restrain your tax dollars from being squandered on “them”. Kennedy read the country’s mood as less self-absorbed than that, and America rewarded him.
And then there is the fact that Kennedy managed to invigorate his supporters without ever really pitting Americans against each other. The rhetoric of politics has been set on a different course ever since: modern liberals describe a country weighted down by privileged interests that have stacked the deck; modern conservatives paint a picture of a society under siege from permissive forces who are burdening success and undermining our values. You can search Kennedy’s speeches in fine detail, and the trait that is missing is a demonization of his domestic antagonists.
He must have been tempted: dogs were being marshaled against children in Birmingham, southern governors were re-litigating the Civil War, and can anyone dispute that the Republicans of his day genuinely were Neanderthals on poverty and health care? That Kennedy resisted the urge to define American politics as a clash of light versus darkness yielded a practical dividend for him – no president since has enjoyed consistently high approval ratings from his rival party – but it was also borne out of the skepticism the old war hero had for blood-feud ideology.
The ironic side of Kennedy no doubt admired Shakespeare’s passage about the Welshman who brags that he can “call spirits from the vasty deep,” and the rejoinder that “So can I, so can any man. But will they come when you do call them?” More than a few charismatic politicians have issued their share of high-flown calls. The last one we have answered, and kept answering, is John Kennedy.
A version of this essay was published in Politico in November, 2011.
By RP Nation, on Fri Nov 22, 2013 at 1:30 PM ET As I have watched and listened to the seemingly endless remembrances of the Kennedy Assassination during the 50th anniversary, I feel compelled to add my two cents.
I was barely two years-old the day JFK died, so I recall nothing first-hand of that day, but like most people, I have been immersed in the events and aftermath of that day for my entire life. In my teens I became very interested in the events of that day, primarily through books and some TV shows. For many years, I was an advocate of the conspiracy/multiple gunman theories. I have since revised my opinions and believe that Oswald acted alone. I say this not to open any debate, just to let you know I have evolved as I grow older.
Aside from the nuts and bolts of those events, I feel the need to examine JFK’s death in a larger context. Those four days in 1963 began a seismic shift in our national awareness, and as has been said so many times, began the loss of innocence in our small part of the world. We all began to understand life was not like “Leave It To Beaver”, or “Father Knows Best”. TV in particular began to change and evolve. JFK’s killing was essentially the beginning of TV as our mutual national campfire. Just like earlier times when we gathered round those real fiires to trade nes and stories, Television served the same purpose. We gathered round it’s warm glow to find out what was happening and important in our world.
Sadly, TV news may have actually peaked on that November day when Kennedy was shot. It’s very possible Walter Cronkite, and Bill Ryan (NBC), were the best breaking news reporters ever on that day. They wrote the book as they were reporting the events and were incredibly good considering the limitations of the early TV technology.
But in a larger sense, it’s my feeling that the assassination began the feel and mindset that defined the decade of the 1960’s. For me, the 60’s aren’t just a typical ten-year decade. It’s a mindset, and sea-change in attitudes and feelings in this country. I would submit the sisties begin with JFK’s killing, and ends with Nixon’s resignation. That time period features the Johnson Administration, Vietnam at it’s peak, Racial strife and reform, more killings with King, and Robert Kennedy, Nixon’s election, and downfall, along with countless other events like Kent State that shook our countryand world to its foundation.
So while recalling the death of JFK this week, let’s also remember the events that it foreshadowed and helped to occur.
By RP Nation, on Wed Nov 20, 2013 at 8:00 AM ET The tears.
All the tears, the weeping, the searching for an understanding of what it meant — this is what I saw and remember.
Three years before Dallas, Senator John Kennedy came to Lexington on October 8, 1960 for a rally on the big yard in front of U.K. Our Dad got us up before sunlight, my brother Keen and me, to get to campus at the step-side corner of the stage.
Almost no one was there. Hundreds arrived, finally several thousand, boisterous and excited, especially the loud group of students chanting “We want Nixon” near us. The place was roaring when Kennedy hopped onstage, where various leaders were waiting. Our grandfather, Keen Johnson, was among them.
As the event ended Kennedy worked the front line right where we were, so our Dad pushed us up to reach out to the candidate as he left.
We managed to get in the long motorcade to the airport. It was near there that I saw the extraordinary Wilson W. Wyatt of Louisville cheering Kennedy. Wyatt shouted “Huh-rah for Kennedy” — not hooray, but a classy, uniquely toned encouragement.
Funny what one remembers.
Then 50 years ago, when Mr. Briscoe Evans came over the intercom at Morton Junior High it was to say that “President Kennedy has been shot. I repeat: President Kennedy has been shot.” I was in study hall, last period, a Friday. Miss Conner, the dear, elderly teacher serving as proctor, was visibly upset.
 Within the hour Evans’ came back on to say the President was dead. Miss Conner buried her face in her hands and wept. She was shaking. We sat in shock, awkward middle schoolers unable to adequately take it in.
My concern grew as school was dismissed for the weekend and teachers were in the hallway, openly crying, even panicked it seemed. I had never seen anything like this.
Kids on my street walked home many days. As we came down the block my friend’s mother stood in their driveway, sobbing. They were Catholic. She cried over and over in the days ahead.
When we reached our house our mother was standing in the doorway too upset to speak.
On the day of the funeral there was the muffled drumbeat, the rider-less horse, the tear-stained face of the former First Lady through her thin black veil, the salute of a little boy to his father.
America watched all of this.
In time Dr. King would be murdered. We were in high school by then. That summer during Boys State at Eastern Kentucky University Robert Kennedy was shot. Then-Speaker of the House Harry King Loman of Ashland, the moderator, told us when RFK was gone.
Mitchell Nance of Glasgow was elected governor of Boys State. All of us thought about public service that week, the price some paid. I recall thinking what a decent guy Nance was. He went on in life to serve on the bench in Barren County.
Months passed. Nixon would rise. Then fall. Years would go by. Reagan would be shot in the first hundred days of his presidency. It happened the week I filed to run for Lexington city council, bringing back the continuum of losses. It all seemed to connect as if the word transition were not a post-election acion, but a way of life never quite understood in advance.
The glorification of Kennedy went on for weeks; clearly this continues. There is much to show for his inspiration, much promise in his step, many poignant moments.
America watched Kennedy. After he refused to wear a top hat to his swearing-in on a truly frigid day, my brother and I told Mom we would never again wear the hats she insisted we have. This pledge became a family laugh line.
Back then, people watched politics in different way. Many were glued to political party nominating convention coverage, or State of the Union addresses, or even presidential appearances from the Oval Office. They spoke of such things matter-of-factly, having paid attention.
You could say that not much else was competing on TV. But there is more to it.
Many, like my brother and me, were “children of the war” — born of parents brought together in the after years of World War II. Parents of this generation paid attention, listened differently than today. Most had heard Roosevelt. All had heard Truman or Ike, their general. It was a duty to listen.
The violent moment of Kennedy’s death left many to lament the death of an era. Some others, though, re-doubled their efforts to see public ideas, moving into action.
In many American moments there has been the deep question of what it will take to unite us. The shock of murder, especially in a schoolhouse, is one. Disaster and tragedy call on us to do something, do what we can, stretch to help.
Given the current moment, however, what losses must we suffer, realize or remember?
Just as failure can often teach more than success, tears may teach us what matters most of all. So might many recollections help us take hold of this piece of time, grow better together, closer to our purpose.
Ask more, just as Kennedy said.
Once when bucking establishment opinion and direction, Kennedy famously scoffed: sometimes the party asks too much. Indeed so.
What today is asking very likely has less to do with party matters, but more to do with what really matters. A simple prayer would ask that we listen, hear the answer.
Bob Babbage is a leading lobbyist who heads Babbage Cofounder. He served Kentucky as secretary of state and state auditor, and often appears in the media for moderate context and perspective. Reach him at Bob@BabbageCofounder.com.
By Artur Davis, on Thu Oct 10, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET The conventional take on the government shutdown is that it is a colossal blunder, but one largely of tactical dimensions: John Boehner underestimating the risk of trying to co-opt Ted Cruz’s brinksmanship gambit; Cruz and his think tank strategists miscalculating public angst over the healthcare law as a license for obstructionism. All true, but at the danger of missing the more substantial reality: the shutdown continues because it is remarkably popular on much of the political right. That is still the case after a week of unmitigated bad publicity for Republicans; it will likely remain so up to and after the point someone invents a fig leaf to make it end. And a Republican base that is undaunted in the face of such a debacle will keep limiting the party’s options with its ready-made barbs about sell-outs and pandering.
And what is an even more depressing truth? Those Republicans who are most at odds with the shutdown have some complicity here too. And no, it is not that they have been weak-kneed deal-cutters whose moderation created a demand for “principled” confrontation. (I have seen only two genuine deals in Washington in nine years: Democrats bending on top bracket tax cuts in late 2010 and Republicans doing the same, from the opposite vantage point, in early 2011, and I don’t hear tax relief for millionaires as an applause line in many Tea Party venues).
The real culpability for us right of center types? They (we) have been too timid in dealing not with Democrats but with a certain variation of conservatism. Those of us on the right who envision conservatism as a brand of public policy and not an enemy of the concept, who conceive that a more cohesive society is a legitimate conservative mission, and don’t confuse the left’s newest ill conceived initiatives with the fading hours before a socialist midnight, could and should have fought harder to keep the right from becoming radicalized. Instead, we soft-pedaled our own sense of responsibility. We bargained on absorbing a hard-right insurgency when we should have been looking harder at its assumptions, and its radicalism.
When it got fashionable to peddle theories that voters—that is, our fellow citizens—were divided between productive contributors to capitalism and coddled takers of government giveaways, too much of the thought leadership of the party sagely nodded. And then when our presidential nominee got caught saying the same thing, we rolled our eyes at his political tin ear without acknowledging that what he said was actually an article of faith in some of our ranks.
We allowed a lot of simplicities to frame our positions on complex issues. For example, we undermined our valid skepticism about the Democratic environmental agenda with muddled charges that science is a conspiracy. We cheapened our warnings about the lingering depth of the Great Recession with pot-shots that the media and the Labor Department were cooking the unemployment numbers.
We showed a little resistance to the hard-right’s musings about abortion and “legitimate rape” and did our share of distancing from mandatory ultrasounds and personhood laws. But the noisiness of these culture wars seemed to worry us more than their inherently un-conservative, big government character—and in our too tepid responses, we missed a chance to arrest the gender gap that is single-handedly turning states like Virginia.
We just shifted in our seat when the diatribes about the machinations of our liberal opponents crossed lines. When the jabs evolved from ritualistic partisanship into an insinuation that we were facing enemies who didn’t share our reverence for the country, our silence implicitly condoned the vitriol.
We didn’t stress enough over the evidence of a gulf between Americans in our respective visions of culture, of the economy, of the very legitimacy of government. If we were bothered that people who view their adversaries as illegitimate will coarsen civic dialogue, we rarely said so, unless it was the left throwing stones at our crowd.
We properly celebrated the grassroots populism on the right for the pragmatic reason that it finally gave Republicans the organizing mechanism to turn our base out; and for the intrinsic reason that activism is the essence of our democracy. But we weren’t quick enough to insist to the movement-minded among us that a political party is at its core not a movement: a party exists to mobilize to win campaigns and in a fractured electorate, winning requires being coalitional rather than ideologically pristine. We developed a weakness for rewarding provocateurs with the spotlight, as if unseriousness were not a ticket to perpetual minority party status.
We were entirely justified in noticing that conservatism had been demonized into the one permissible category for ridicule and verbal abuse. But we seemed so frustrated at our lost ground that we were tone deaf about how our partisan anger played to a middle class preoccupied with its own struggles—therefore, we missed the impression that we were more outraged about our own powerlessness than the powerlessness of the blue collars who not so long ago were part of our political base.
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Today, South Africa stands taller because it stands on the shoulders of Nelson Mandela.
