Hillary's Tax Returns

First off, a little street cred. I'm not a Hillary Basher. Or in the cyber age, a HillaryBasher. Once, in a fey and whimsical mood, I betrayed my own egalitarian principles by pointing out that Hillary's substantial (massive, really) undercarriage could be used to good effect by comparing it favorably to Obama's (or, a fortiori, Kucinich's) lower body strength by mounting the debate stage a little more dramatically. To wit, Hillary would bound onto the platform, charge a blocking sled and drive, drive, drive that sucker all the way over to Tim Russert's podium, where it would up-end that blowhard and his clipboard of "gotcha!" questions. Those short, chunky legs pumping, muscles straining the seams of that burnt-orange pantsuit -- what a moment! A great visual, but, of course -- such a suggestion casts enormous discredit on me, and I'm deeply ashamed I ever thought of it, especially when it still doubles me over with helpless laughter.

Anyway, things between Barack & Hill are going to get wild enough as it is. You can feel it coming. The other night Hillary answered a question on "60 Minutes" about Barack's religion by saying he was not a Muslim "as far as I know." Oh man, this is gonna get ugly. It's good they're not debating anymore because I don't think they could stand the proximity to each other. But back to my street cred: there is no question that I would (a) vote for Hillary vs. McCain and (b) even send Hill some money to help her cause along. Whatever else happens, I don't want the Supreme Court nominations to be in the hands of the Republicans for another 4 to 8 years, because people like Stevens, Ginsburg and Kennedy are not going to last that long on the bench. So imagine Scalia, Thomas, Roberts & Alito augmented by another three legal Neanderthals for another twenty years. Bye-bye, Roe vs. Wade. Hey, Bill of Rights! Don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way to the dump. Hillary will be okay. Stop whining, Obamaniacs. Anyway, pull your socks up and get to work. If you can't stand up to Hillary, how do you plan to face down the Chinese Colossus when you're in the Oval Office? America's taking a good hard look to find out.

What we can't take a good, hard look at to find out concerns Hillary's tax returns, on account she ain't showin'. This is a mess. As about so many things, I have a theory about this which may be just beneath the surface of what you've heard so far about the reasons for her reluctance. She has said she would release them "if she gets the nomination." The blow-dried, room-temp IQs on cable news (nota bene, there's a blog title: The IQs of Cable News) of course think this has to do with the practical necessity of disclosure (technically, it's never required, since they're privileged documents for her and everyone), but I suspect it has to do with timing. By waiting till then, she'll release her 2007 tax return, not 2006 or earlier. I further suspicion (as my Southern ancestors usta say) that earlier years may have been joint returns with Bill the Horndog, which must be enormously complicated 1040's, and which probably have a huge number representing adjusted gross income, since the story is that Bill routinely pulls down $100,000 + every time he addresses some group like the Allied Magneto Importers of America (the manufacturers having been disbanded for failure to achieve a quorum). But a 2007 return just might be a separate 1040 of Hillary alone, because she (and Slick Willie) have anticipated this moment for a long time. I think Bill does a ton of business with people you might associate with so-called Petro States (or PetroStates; see above) and other unsavory characters, and the inference drawn even by the emaciated intellect of the American Booboisie (op.cit., Mencken) might be unfavorable.

A separate return shields Bill from unwanted publicity and makes it more difficult for forensic accountants to figure out where, for example, Hillary got that $5 mil she loaned her campaign a few weeks ago. Reverse engineering of capital gains, dividend and interest income will suggest (but not definitively reveal) her holdings of stocks, bonds, real estate and foreign investments, but not necessarily spell out the principal amounts nor the identity of income sources. And with careful money management in 2007 (i.e., avoiding liquidations or income recognition), Hillary could conceal a lot more, confining things as far as possible to her Senate salary (which for her is lunch money).

Hey, that's okay. It passes for candor and good faith in this sullied age. The main, overarching thing that Hillary didn't want all those laid-off factory workers in Ohio to find out, like the guy who can't afford to pay for his wife's multiple scelerosis palliative treatment because his job went to China and he's uninsurable, is how frigging rich she is. Because then those tears coursing down those magnificent cheek bones (a little self rehab there) would seem, well, vaguely unconvincing. Bill & Hill, remember, like summering at Martha's Vineyard and starting the New Year off right at the Renaissance Weekend with all the other glitterati (op.cit., Herb Caen). They feel your pain, all right; they just don't want any part of it.

The arbitrariness of conviction

In reply to those who claim I don't really know much about Barack Obama, I answer: true. I don't really know much about Hillary Clinton, either. I didn't know much about Bill Clinton or George W. Bush. Only staffers and campaign managers, who hang out with these people, know much about them. They see them in day-to-day situations, watch how they react to surprises and contingencies calling for a decision, and they gradually form realistic appraisals about them. That's what we call human beings "knowing" someone. We don't have the insiders' vantage point. I've never seen Barack or Hillary in person; they exist as pixel images on my flat screen TV; in a close-up, I'm guessing they're represented at about a 1:2 scale, but they only have two dimensions. I listen to them, but they're mostly reformulating sentences they've said hundreds of times before. They're not actually engaged in a give-and-take with me. Maybe if I hung out with each of them for thirty days or so, and we talked for a few hundred hours about just anything that occurred to us, and went to a ball game and to a bar, and played chess or Scrabble and watched Jeopardy! together, maybe shot some hoops, and I got my guitar out and we sang "Margaritaville," and then I asked each of these lawyers for help on some complicated legal issue I'm working on...well, then I'd probably actually have the basis for an opinion.

The odds of those things happening aren't very good, are they? I suppose when the Founding Fathers put their ideas of democracy together, the structure for it, the connection between candidate and electorate was much closer to what I've just described than it is now. The operation of the town hall was close to their experience; it was unlikely, in the Concord election of Selectmen in 1795 or so, that the local Yankees would put the village drunk in charge of their finances. As visionary as they might have been, there was no way for Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Franklin to imagine the post-McLuhan Age of virtual reality. Essentially, we still use the same system they devised, but the candidates who succeed now are not necessarily the people who would do best at the level of one-to-one interaction I described above. They're the ones who are adept, under the guidance of their handlers, at manipulating the images they project to appeal to broad-based demographics. I think we all know that. When we express our preference for a candidate, however, we are not basing it on the appeal of their "image;" rather, we are using our intuitive powers of perception to imagine what this person would be like if we actually had the opportunity to get to know him/her. It's possible, if I ever had the chance at any sort of intimacy, that I would like Hillary more than Barack; she might be funnier, quicker with an insight, more reassuring in her comprehension.

I don't even understand very well what process finally produced these two as the "inevitable" candidates for the Democrats. I would surmise that it's not an accident that one is a woman and the other is African-American. Both seemed like plausible candidates. The mainstream media saw the "story line" implicit in their choice and began playing them up. Let's face it, it's a more compelling narrative than Joe Biden versus Chris Dodd. After they seemed inevitable, after their images were burned into the psyche of the American populace, it then became our job to form some kind of "commitment" to one or the other, even though we did not really have much of a role in narrowing our choices to these two.

That's how it works now in the World of Mass Media Man. Don't pretend it doesn't. You can come at me with your "arguments," and your "insights" into the candidates based on something you've read on the Web written by some special pleader; and I can counter with some obscure thing I've read somewhere else. And the truth is neither one of us will be very convincing.

Sure, I Voted for Obama

It is my considered opinion that this nation has moved past the point where carrying on with business as usual will succeed. I tend to agree with an erstwhile professor of mine, Chalmers Johnson, that the nemesis awaiting America is the combination of consequences stemming from imperial overstretch, environmental degradation and international competition. If we continue doing things as we have done them for the last 35 years, our standard of living, which has been on a downward trajectory since 1973, will fall to Third World standards, we'll continue as greenhouse-gas outlaws, and our financial system will unravel completely due to federal deficits, national debt and trade imbalance.

We call ourselves a "service economy," which is the current euphemism now that "information age" has lost its cachet. We didn't arrive at an economy based on consumerism through deliberate choice; it's what was left to us after our industrial base was hollowed out by foreign competition and and offshoring of American jobs. Asian countries in particular have succeeded to those mainstay jobs of our former middle class, replaced by the "crap jobs" of the service economy. However, it seems to me that the world, which is currently in a state of 40% overshoot in resource utilization (which is breaking down the Earth's capacity to sustain human life), cannot long continue with the nonrenewable energy paradigm. Things have to shift fundamentally. The United States, under the right leadership, could again lead the way.

Since that's where I think we are, I look at the available list of viable candidates and conclude that only Obama makes any sense. "Experience" is not the key factor; indeed, it may be a huge liability to the extent that it indicates a candidate, such as John McCain, will tend to think in antiquated ways about meeting modern challenges. The same can be said about Hillary Clinton; I have no doubt she understands all the issues (when she discusses global warming, for example, she's a model of clarity and comprehension), but I think ultimately she won't change anything because her style is to make whatever compromise is necessary for the sake of political expedience. Obama may turn out to be the same, but at least he's demonstrated some independence of mind, most notably about the Iraq war. Clinton and Obama are both very smart, but Obama's younger, and that's a plus in my book. His generation will have to live longer in the America he begins to create, and he's less tied into the old (as in fossilized) approach to doing things.

In general, I think there's a huge problem with senescence in American politics, an artifact of the near-impossibility of voting out incumbents. The Senate, for example, is by and large a club of ancient white men. Their frame of reference for the United States is about forty years out of date. The Republican Party is infested with "social issues" parasites like Tom DeLay and Newt Gingrich, and amoral apparatchiks like Karl Rove, whose only interest is in maintaining power for one party as a sort of political game. These aren't people who can lead the United States effectively anymore. If the United States attempts to continue its Eisenhower-era economy, we're not going to have the dubious luxury of worrying about gay marriage and abortion-on-demand, because the middle class will be destroyed, the entitlements programs will go bankrupt, and we'll lose our competitive place in the world.

I think Bill Clinton was a good president, whose personal style (not the sex, but his political cowardice and his disorganization) kept him from being great. I don't see how that has anything to do with Hillary Clinton. She does not strike me as anyone unique or charismatic, which is really all Bill had going on, but, like Bill, her administration would mostly stir the pot because of a kind of obsession with compromise. Small, incremental changes, slight decreases in defense spending, tinkering with the tax code, some "middle ground" on Iraq and Afghanistan, such as phased withdrawals over a four-year period, and a nod of acquiescence toward alternative energy and transportation, such as increased tax credits. Healthcare will wobble along toward complete breakdown. All of this follows from the perception that the stodgy members of Congress will recognize that Hillary is someone "they can do business with," meaning, continue to do the business of lobbyists.

As I say, Obama may find the political culture of Washington, D.C. an immovable object, and will slump down into feckless compromise. If I were a betting man, that's the way I think it will turn out; but it's guaranteed if Hillary is elected. So what the hell? My hunch is that Obama holds more promise than he can put on display within the dreadful limitations of Big Media politics. A candidate has to reserve the big ideas until after election; remember that in 1999, George W. Bush scoffed at the notion of nation-building. By the time of his second inaugural, he had decided on the messianic goal of rebuilding the entire world. Maybe Obama can use the amped-up power of the unitary executive forged by Cheney & Co. to do something really useful and transformative, as opposed to merely insane and delusional. You never know until you give a guy a chance to try.