America has lost sight of Thanksgiving’s meaning

By:

LeRoy Goldman

The Charlotte Observer

November 26, 2015

Two of the “regulars” who comment on my columns, a bank executive from Wisconsin and a cardiologist from North Carolina, sing the same refrain, “Well done, but too negative. Tell us how to end gridlock.”

Fair enough. But it’s hard, really hard. But maybe, just maybe, the answer hides in plain sight here on Thanksgiving Day.

America has lost sight of Thanksgiving’s meaning.

In many ways Thanksgiving is a uniquely American national holiday. It was first celebrated by the Pilgrims and Native Americans in 1621. They thanked God for the blessings of their harvest. They knew that their very existence depended upon it.

The first Thanksgiving Proclamation was signed by President Washington on October 3, 1789. It read in part, “I recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the people of these states to the service of that great and glorious Being...That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks.”

In 1863 President Lincoln’s proclamation made Thanksgiving a national holiday. The Proclamation called for a “national day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.”

For the Pilgrims and Presidents Washington and Lincoln, there’s no denying that giving thanks to God was the centerpiece of Thanksgiving.

But now Thanksgiving has been dumbed-down into a day of gluttony.

In very different ways we have dumbed-down politics and governance too. Americans have walled themselves off into two separate, warring nations, the Reds and the Blues, who loathe one another. Each of them believes they have a corner on truth. Each believes compromise is surrender. Each elects individuals who will perpetuate paralysis.

Perhaps there’s a way out. Take an hour and a half out of your otherwise barren Thanksgiving Day and watch the classic, Academy Award-winning 1947 film, Miracle on 34th Street.

Starring Edmund Gwenn as Kris Kringle, the cast also includes Maureen O’Hara and Natalie Wood, who plays a girl who like her mother, played by O’Hara, does not believe in Santa Claus. O’Hara, a Macy’s executive, is in charge of orchestrating the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and she recruits Kringle to be Macy’s Santa.

But she ends up with far more than she bargained for. Kringle not only believes he’s Santa Claus, but he also believes that he’s the one and only Santa Claus. If that’s not enough, he has the temerity to send Macy’s customers to its corporate rival, Gimbels, if Macy doesn’t have the toy a child wants.

Messrs. Macy and Gimbel loathe each other. Think of them as modern day Red and Blue generalissimos. They each share the same objective, the destruction of the other.

Kris Kringle throws a monkey wrench into all these destructive relationships. His unjust dessert includes being fired and being deemed dangerously mentally ill. He’s imprisoned, and put on trial.

But then it happens. Macy’s sales surge due to the publicity of Kringle’s advice to children. Gimbels is forced to follow suit. Messrs. Macy and Gimbel discover that they can prosper by cooperating with one another.

Kringle’s enterprising lawyer, played by John Payne, finds an ingenious way to prove in court that Kringle is the one and only Santa Claus. His legal tour de force not only delights New Yorkers of all ages, it melts the hearts of both female leads.

So, an old man with a bit of divine inspiration changes everything. Are you such an individual? What counts is what’s in your heart, not your wallet.

Goldman worked on Capitol Hill and at the National Institutes of Health. He has retired to Flat Rock.

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Election outlook 2016: Here comes Hillary

By 

LeRoy Goldman

BlueRidgeNow

Our Guest columnist

Published: Sunday, November 15, 2015 at 4:30 a.m.

Looks to me like Hillary has the inside track to the White House. Whether such an outcome engenders ecstasy or revulsion is not the point. What is worth examining is how and why she may be the nation's next president. It's not a pretty picture.

There is no doubt that the nation has been in decline for a very long time. Poll after poll tells the same story. Americans in large numbers believe the nation is headed in the wrong direction. Large majorities also have contempt for the president and the Congress, regardless of their party affiliation. Voter anger is palpable.

Barack Obama waltzed into the White House in 2009. His campaign of Hope and Change was music to the ears of most Americans. His victory came with large majorities in both the House and the Senate. But by the 2010 election the honeymoon was over. Think Obamacare.

Since then it's been all downhill for the Democratic Party in Congress and at the state level. President Obama's inexperience coupled with the bitter polarity engendered by Obamacare have severely harmed the Democrats. Since 2010, the Democrats have lost 13 Senate seats, 69 House seats, 12 governors, 30 state legislative chambers, and 919 state legislative seats. Republican legislative dominance is now stronger than at any time since 1928!

This carnage at the state level for the Democrats is what has enabled the Republicans to solidify their control of the House of Representatives through gerrymandering. Their dominance of the House is likely to last until at least 2022. President Obama's unforced errors destroyed his ability to work with Congress in a bipartisan manner, and they will cast a long shadow over Hillary Clinton if she is elected.

Here's a useful way to understand better how America has cornered itself politically. On Nov. 3, 2010, the day after the huge GOP victory at the polls, the president held a news conference during which he said, "It makes no sense for China to have better rail systems than us, and Singapore having better airports than us. And we just learned that China now has the fastest supercomputer on Earth — that used to be us."

A year later, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Thomas Friedman and Johns Hopkins professor Michael Mandelbaum borrowed the president's phrase, "That Used To Be Us," for the title of their insightful book that powerfully chronicles America's decline. In the chapter of the book dealing with energy policy, they state, "The Democrats were cowardly, and the Republicans were crazy."

With an additional four years of hindsight, it is now clear that their acid condemnation of both political parties applies far more broadly than just to energy policy. The Democrats, for example, have shown cowardice on the urgent need for entitlement and tax reform. President Obama created the Simpson-Bowles Commission, and when its report was issued, he and the Democrats ran from it like a scalded dog. Similarly, once the House Freedom Caucus began to flex its muscle by putting a choke collar around John Boehner's neck, crazy things began to happen like voting to repeal Obamacare 50-60 times or voting to shut down the federal government.

Although both parties have worked hard and successfully to earn the distrust and enmity of the American people, there is no denying the enormous advantage the Democrats have when it comes to the presidential election. That advantage exists where it counts the most — in the Electoral College. The Democrats basically have a lock on states with 247 of the 270 electoral votes necessary for victory. That means victory is only a couple of swing states away. That's Hillary's ace in the hole.

Alternatively, Matthew Continetti, writing recently in the Washington Free Beacon, believes Clinton can be beaten. He states, "Clinton can't be trusted. Trade, same-sex marriage, crime, foreign policy — she'll betray you whenever it suits her political needs. She lied about the Benghazi video; she lied about her email; she lied about Sidney Blumenthal. That what she does. She lies." And Continetti argues that Clinton will have to defend both of Obama's unpopular and significant achievements, Obamacare and the Iran deal. He concludes, "A race to the bottom is a race we can win."

It's not clear to me that the GOP wins a race to the bottom. That's so because the Republicans have problems of their own that, left unattended, will hamstring their nominee, regardless of Hillary Clinton's character flaws.

In a recent Politico Magazine article, Michael Lind argues the GOP has lost its intellectual moorings. It no longer has a coherent set of beliefs that resonate with the American electorate. Lind suggests that the Republican Party's greatest obstacle to governing is that its ideology is "not only disconnected from the values of the larger society but from the values and interests of Republicans themselves."

Lind suggests that what used to be accepted pillars of Republican thought, tax cuts, a more robust military coupled with military intervention around the world, and the social policies of the Religious Right are no longer fully embraced by most Republicans. Lind believes the GOP must "abandon the old orthodoxy altogether and start afresh." He's right.

Unfortunately, soul searching of that magnitude is not in the cards for the GOP. That's why Hillary has the inside track. If so, the nation ends up where we started — cowards at one end of Pennsylvania Avenue and crazies at the other.

LeRoy Goldman is a Flat Rock resident. 

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Stuffing the gerrymandering geenie back in the bottle

Stuffing the gerrymandering geenie back in the bottle

By

LeRoy Goldman

Guest Columnist

Citizen-Times

November 2, 2015

The stars were aligned for the GOP in the 2010 election when opposition to Obamacare enabled the Republicans to take control of the House of Representatives and also win control of many state legislatures and Governor's Mansions. All of this occurred as new census data mandated the redrawing of congressional district boundaries. Predictably the Republicans seized the opportunity to indulge themselves in a gerrymandering orgy.

But gerrymandering dates back to the dawn of the 19th century. It has become as American as apple pie, and has been practiced with increasing vengeance by both political parties. Carried to its current extreme, it is a bipartisan evil that has contributed significantly to the stalemate in the House of Representatives. While it will never be possible to expect politicians to relinquish the opportunity to draw district lines in ways that advantage themselves, gerrymandering has now turned democracy upside down. Instead of voters choosing a Congressman to represent them, gerrymandering has enabled incumbent Congressmen to choose the voters who will assure their reelection. At the heart of this undemocratic abuse lies the Majority-Minority district.

These districts are ones in which a majority of its residents are racial or ethnic minorities. Most all of them are represented by African-Americans or Hispanics. The vast majority are Democrats. In 1982 there were 35 such districts. By 2014 the number had skyrocketed to 118.

But the explosive growth of these utterly safe Democratic districts has had a counter intuitive, boomerang effect. Remarkably they have advantaged the Republicans and helped them maintain control of the House. The GOP figured out that packing districts with minorities who vote overwhelmingly Democratic made it possible for them to win in many more neighboring districts. Thus the GOP took control of the House in 1994 for the first time in 40 years and has steadily strengthened it grip ever since.

The Democrats suffer in silence for fear that challenging the necessity for such districts will subject them to cries of racism by the minority groups who benefit from these sinecures. The GOP is similarly silent, gleefully knowing they have become the unintended beneficiaries of reverse racism.

And there you have it. Political correctness, reverse racism, and both political party's obsession with maintaining partisan advantage and exacting retribution have combined to emasculate the House of Representatives. Any realistic hope of reform must be external to those who have been responsible for and who perpetuate this mess.

The courts, ultimately the Supreme Court, could put this matter right. In fact the Supreme Court came within a single vote of doing just that in 2001. Let's look at how breathtakingly close it came to rectifying this problem.

In two landmark cases, Baker v. Carr in 1962 and Reynolds v. Sims in 1964 the Supreme Court thrust the judiciary into a determination of the constitutionality of a state's voting districts. In his opinion in Baker v. Carr Justice William O. Douglas said, “if a voter no longer has the constitutional value of his right to vote and the legislative branch fails to take appropriate restorative action, the doors of the court must be open to him”.

Throughout the 1990s Duke Law Professor Robinson Everett, a Liberal Democrat, was the driving force behind three law suits that were decided by the Supreme Court that challenged North Carolina's two Majority-Minority congressional districts as unconstitutional racial gerrymanders. Everett believed these districts violated the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause. The Supreme Court in 5-4 decisions agreed with Everett in the first two cases, Shaw v. Reno in 1993 and Shaw v. Hunt in 1996. But Everett lost the third and decisive case, Easley v. Cromartie, in 2001 when Justice Sandra Day O'Connor switched her vote.

Justice O'Connor's volte-face was especially disappointing given the fact that in writing for the majority in one of the two earlier cases she had said, “a reapportionment plan that includes in one district individuals who belong to the same race, but who are otherwise widely separated by geographic and political boundaries, and who may have little in common with one another but the color of their skin, bears an uncomfortable resemblance to political apartheid”.

Robinson Everett passed away in 2009. But his legacy lives, and, more importantly, a Supreme Court decision overturning racial gerrymanders is all the more urgent. A new case brought by a lawyer intent upon completing what Judge Everett began is the way to put the evil gerrymandering genie back in the bottle.

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