Remembering Joe Shattan — and What I Learned About Him from His Office

The Eisenhower Executive Office Building. (Public domain photo)

Former Dan Quayle and Dick Cheney speechwriter Joe Shattan died this past summer. I'm late in hearing about it (it happened in early June), but I would like to share some memories I have of him.

"What? John, you know a Quayle/Cheney speechwriter?" Yes, in the summer of 1990, I had an internship in the Office of the Vice President of the United States. Of America. It was thanks to the Institute for Educational Affairs (an organization that I think continues today under a different name).

Anyway, I was assigned to work with Zelda Novak (daughter of the "Prince of Darkness" conservative columnist Robert Novak), and I spent the summer doing pretty useless work in appropriate obscurity. But on the other side of my desk (stuffed in a cubby hole) was the office of Joseph Shattan, who was often traveling with the VP and who allowed me to spend my lunch hours in his office when he wasn't there. I never got to know him well or much at all, but I did get a good sense of him during those lunch hours, and you can see why.

I'm from Green Bay, Wisconsin. If you're a Green Bay person and there exists a photo of you with a Packer player, you've got it framed on your walls, and probably in a prominent place. In Washington, D.C., people are the same way about big politicians, and usually their desks and walls are covered with framed photos of them shaking hands with or at least photobombing presidents, vice presidents, senators, governors, and representatives.

But Joe Shattan? In his quiet, neat, book-filled office, he had plenty of photos, but they were of him and his family. Wife. Kids. I saw all those and didn't see the other celebrity-suck-up photos, and thought to myself, "This guy has his priorities right. Good guy."

When I stumbled across the news today that he had passed away (on June 8, 2014, at the young age of 63, felled by cancer), I found a couple things that reminded me of my fondness for this person. First, other people were writing about what a kind and genuine person he was — not something you generally associate with political people, especially conservative political functionaries who spent decades in government.

The other thing was a link to an article Shattan had written in 2009, in which he remembered how much he loved visiting the library in the Old Executive Office Building (a large old building next to the White House where the vice president has his office and staff). Shattan, a writer and clearly a book lover, really enjoyed going to the library, taking in the atmosphere of books and busy librarians and available information in that pre-internet age. Back then, I hadn't known about his joy for that library, but I had also enjoyed escaping to it when my useless tasks allowed. I can still remember that library well, with its beautiful columns and spiral staircases and awesome collections of books. I especially recall the corner where I dug through countless old copies of The New York Review of Books. It was the summer in which I had just discovered John Updike and Philip Roth, so I loved searching for old reviews of their books. The library was the one room in the Old Executive Office Building (now known as the Eisenhower Executive Office Building) that had the same nice vibe as Joe Shattan's office.

I never knew Joe Shattan well, but I apparently knew him well enough to know that this book-loving intellectual whose politics were quite different from what mine became was a good man. I'm very sorry to hear about his passing. R.I.P.

Government Shutdown and Debt Ceiling Blues: Free audio

Here is the link to the streaming audio of my Week to Week political roundtable program from last night, with great panelists Lisa Vorderbrueggen, Josh Richman, and Debra J. Saunders. There was, as you'd expect, much talk about the parallel disasters facing us: Debt ceiling, government shutdown, Obamacare rollout, and BART strike.

People can also download it as a free podcast if they either go to their iTunes Store and search for "commonwealth club" or if they go to the iTunes web page.

All Is Lost

Well, this is a gobsmacker.

Wisconsin had the absolute worst job record of all 50 states for the past 12 months; but according to a poll of voters in that state, they're supporting Republican Gov. Scott Walker because they think he's the better job creator. He's got a 7-point advantage over Democrat Tom Barrett (up from 6 points a few days ago).

Considering the $30 million in recall campaign funds Gov. Walker has pulled in (especially from well-heeled out-of-state friends), this makes me think as goes Wisconsin, so goes America.

The New San Francisco Examiner: The Paper with No Voice

At the end of November 2011, The San Francisco Examiner was sold by its right-wing owner to another publisher, Black Press Group, which publishes many other papers, including the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. The question many of us in San Francisco (at least those of us who pay attention to real media) was whether the new owners would continue the populist hard-right opinion pages of the previous owner or if they would moderate it somewhat.

Today on my way to work, I picked up a copy, reasoning that the publishers have had enough time to make at least their initial changes in editorial policy. The Examiner is a free daily, filled with color, and in many ways it is nicely designed. It's thin – only 20 pages today – but then again it's a free paper with no newsstand or subscription revenue and this is a time of economic strain. But it still should have an editorial section, a page at least, and I was startled to see that it had none. Nor do I see anyone on the page two senior staff listing with a title of editorials editor or opinion pages editor or any such title.

There simply is no opinion section, not even a half-page. No letters to the editor, no editorial columnists, no op-ed columnists, no unsigned editorials. In short, it's a paper without a voice.

Opinion pages can appear in many forms, and they've been done in many ways. (Those of us from the Midwest remember hearing about the Chicago Tribune running editorial cartoons on the front page years earlier.) The paper can be conservative, liberal, moderate, radical, populist, erudite, a mishmash of all of those. But it should be something.

A well-done opinion section can be fun for an editor to put together and an absorbing (and yes, sometimes entertaining) experience for the reader. That The Examiner's new owners are depriving their staff and readers of this section is sad enough.

But the real shame of it is that San Francisco could use a well-done editorial voice, one that isn't lamely leftist and certainly one that isn't populist right-wing. (I still remember picking up a copy of The Examiner a few years ago and being confronted by at least two full pages of opinion pieces attacking ACORN – a tilt-at-windmills cause that only the far right ever cared about.) The city rather dearly needs an intelligent voice that can dissent from the prevailing political culture here and introduce new ideas and give criticism that has a chance of being heard. The venting-type right-wing silliness of The Examiner's previous incarnation had the dual problem of being too right-wing for even the conservatives in San Francisco while also being easily ignored because it echoed the worst of the fire-breathing populist conservatism that has taken over the Republican Party nationally.

Give San Francisco a daily voice that can be moderate or conservative, but particularly one that is smart enough to get itself heard with well-reasoned arguments, that listens to its opponents, and that can engage the attention and loyalty of that huge swath of San Franciscans who repeatedly reject the far-left at the mayoral ballot box every four years.

That would be a rewarding business move, because I think there are a lot of readers and advertisers who are looking for such a publication (and it's one of the reasons monthlies such as Northside San Francisco are growing aggressively). (Point to note: I am a columnist for Northside).

It would also be a rewarding move from the perspective of a newspaper really serving its community. It's one thing to tell people what they want to hear; it's another to tell them what they might not want to hear but that can help them be better citizens.

It's what newspapers at their best do. It's what The San Francisco Examiner isn't doing right now.

Pelosi Whets Our Appetite for Newt Gingrich Candidacy

Read the above short note that was posted on Talking Points Memo. Anyone who thought the Democrats were worried about a "smart" Republican like Gingrich becoming the Republican nominee for president simply doesn't know what they're talking about.

And Pelosi does know what she's talking about. But she waved off pleas for details: “When the time’s right.”

Just give us a 15-minute warning before that press conference, so we have time to make popcorn and open up a few cold sodas.

Everyone's a Corporation ... I Mean, a Person

Interesting: The conservative state of Mississippi will vote to officially declare that a person is a person from conception. Will that mean that any time I can conceive of a corporation, it will be illegal to destroy it? I think I've just found a way to ensure that my business plan is finally funded ...

News International Continues Trying to Change the Subject

Not to be outdone by The Wall Street Journal's whining that it was being drawn into the salacious scandal of its owner, over in the UK News International (which, like the WSJ, is owned ultimately by News Corp.) is trying desperately to change the subject.

The subject, of course, is the phone hacking scandal that has morphed into a Watergate-level threat to that country's political elite.

So how did The Sun, News International's other bottom-feeding tabloid besides the now-defunct News of the World, report on the scandal today? The only thing I saw on its website was this:

Yes, this is News International's "Leave Britney alone!" moment.

Maybe if I dug and dug I might have found something else on the paper's website about this huge scandal. But if this is the first thing one comes across when searching for the hacking scandal on that scandal sheet's website, then this is the first thing the paper's owners want you to see.

New York Post Exposes ... Obama's Vacation Clothes

Wow. Talk about a slow news day at the right-wing New York Post. Check out its cover below, which was assembled by editors who thought this was the most significant news of the day.

And no, I don't think there's anything wrong with what Obama is wearing. And I'm 99 percent certain that neither you nor anyone else thought that, either, and this is another of those entirely manufactured controversies that certain media players concoct to give their talking (and writing) heads something to blather on about.

Carl Paladino Gets the Taiwan CGI Treatment

Honestly, every time I see one of these, I love Taiwan more and more. If the People's Republic of China ever succeeds in taking over Taiwan, they'll probably destroy this great video tradition. But until then, this is some of the best take-no-prisoners political slapstick around.

California Politicalanalia

Politics isn't pretty, even if many of the youthful (read: naive) supporters of Obama thought so. They know that in Chicago and New York. The should know it in California, but they keep forgetting it (which is, I guess, part of the state's charm to many people).

Back in 2000, when George W. Bush's political team and GOP activists defeated Al Gore's team in the Florida election debacle, writer Molly Ivins quipped, "These Gore people have no idea how to steal an election. What happened to the Democrats? They used to have some skill at this."

When the Tea Party and the Republican Party made a mockery of the congressional town hall meetings two Augusts ago, I was stunned that the Democrats were completely taken by surprise and seemed unable to stand up to the political thugs who were derailing the public health-care debate. Only Rep. Barney Frank, bless 'im, slapped them back with the force they deserved.

Now in California, we have an "October surprise" sprung on billionaire GOP gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, in which a former housekeeper is claiming that Meg knew the housekeeper was an illegal alien when she worked for the zillionaire for nine years. Whitman not only says that's not true, but she blames her opponent, Democrat Jerry Brown, for pushing the story.

My thought: I kind of hope Brown is behind it. Or, at least, I hope the Brown campaign has the political toughness to be capable of playing hardball with Whitman's camp, which has been slandering Brown and his supporters for months.

What? you say. Aren't you Mr. Good Government? Yes, and thank you for remembering. But this isn't a case of the housekeeper's story being totally manufactured; both sides agree on large parts of it, and frankly my interpretation is that it's probably not as bad as the housekeeper (or her celebrity-hunting lawyer) alleges, but it's certainly not as good as Whitman and her money-machine claim. In fact, the only thing that makes me think the Brown camp might have had anything to do with it is that it extremely conveniently broke in the news the week before the Brown-Whitman debate on Spanish-language media. Yes, it could have happened that way without Brown's fingerprints, but it does seem a bit suspicious. Then again, Whitman has repeatedly failed to offer any evidence of her claim that the Brownies are behind the story, so Whitman's reckless allegations might end up being Brown's biggest defense.

But regardless of who pushed the story, it serves Brown's needs. Even if it doesn't dramatically dent Whitman's already thin support among Hispanic voters, it has derailed her message for at least a week and likely for a bit more. She has had to go on the defensive, instead of speaking her robotically repetitive talking points about her gubernatorial plans.

So, whether the state Democrats have rediscovered how to play hardball, or if it was just good timing, or even if there is no direct wrongdoing proved by Meg Whitman, this story has served a higher purpose.

Crazy Politics Is Nothing New

Americans are dreamers. Some dreams, such as the belief in hard work paying off in success, can be useful and can serve to give people hope during hard times. Other dreams, such as the expectation that national politics should be a mild and uncontentious affair, are dangerous because they actually lead people to take actions that undermine republican government itself.

These thoughts come to mind as I reflect on many people's shock at the rise of extremist politicians in our national debates, as well as the increasing rancor between the parties in Washington, D.C. Often, national figures in the media and in politics are asked about this heated partisanship, and usually they respond by treating it as an unfortunate but temporary fact of life. Well, it is a fact of life, and it is unfortunate, but it is not temporary. I think we had better get used to the fact that American politics is going to remain in the gutter.

This is where history demonstrates its importance, and Americans pay the price for having five-minute memories. That's because American history is filled with many more years of contentious, rude, and outrageous political behavior than it is with years of peaceful coexistence among all of the country's varying factions. 

That's what makes the cover story in the September 20, 2010, issue of New York magazine both important and a bit off-base. It's a profile of Jon Stewart and his Daily Show team, going behind the scenes to see how they react to the news, what they think about the media, and what they do. All interesting. The pitch, as you can see on the cover, suggests short memories, however. The small cover text asks about Stewart, "Wasn't the Obama era supposed to make him irrelevant? If only." A good cover line, but it assumes that the Bush era was an anomaly and that people were expecting to return to some mythical golden age of "bi-partisan" "non-confrontational" national politics. If only. 

From Preston Brooks beating Charles Sumner with his cane on the floor of the Senate, to Grover Cleveland's opponents accusing him during the presidential campaign of having fathered an illegitimate child, American politics has almost always been a bare-knuckled affair. Lies abounded. Voter intimidation was a regular occurrence. The media was partisan and corrupt.

I'm not saying I like that kind of politics; in fact, I think it's destructive and it keeps people from discussing and solving the real problems facing us. I'm just saying that that is what most of our nation's history has been like and will be like.

We were led to believe otherwise because we have had an unusual period of relative political peace. Post-WWII we had two parties that both tried to serve the middle of the spectrum. (Of course, we also had Marxists to put the fear of violence in the minds of the businesses. But when that fear went away, the polarization, the lying, the cheating, the intimidation, the brazen fakery came back.)

What created that unusual period of peace? It was a number of things, all of which were historically ephemeral. The United States defeated its biggest competitors in World War II and then it ran the world. It had unprecedented prosperity in those decades when international markets were opening to our goods (thanks in no small part to the destruction of the British empire, the withdrawal from economic engagement of the Soviet bloc, and the fact that Europe was flat on its back). Americans decided rapid and unchallenged economic growth was our birthright from God. Meanwhile, big media got big, and the way it got and stayed rich was to pitch to the center (of tastes, of income, of politics). The Religious Right had largely withdrawn from politics after the Scopes Monkey Trial; it would not begin to return until (slowly at first) Sen. Barry Goldwater, then Jimmy Carter and finally Ronald Reagan began tapping into it as a way to get support from outside the mainstream party constituents. Thanks to the economy's unprecedented growth (and a lack of major downturns, due to the government's role in smoothing out the boom-and-bust cycle), there was a growing middle class, which served as a moderating and stabilizing force. More and more students pursued higher education; new jobs in computers and science required more education, and they also paid better salaries. Exciting (and nationalistically supportive) advances in science fed people and money into further scientific education and research, all of which fed our continuing advances in economics and science.

You get the point. It was a virtuous cycle, but not a perpetual one. Other countries recovered from their previous economic and military weaknesses. The Religious Right decided it liked having a seat at the table. The Soviet bloc shrugged off communism. The media landscape fractured, with news departments splicing and targeting segments of the population instead of the broad middle. America's love of science withered, and its previous love of patent-medicine new-age BS returned.

I'm not sure just how upset we should be about people like Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, and Karl Rove. I think all of them are part of a very negative trend in this country. My point with this post is just to note that they are more normal than we would like to believe. Barack Obama – for whom I voted in 2008, and for whom I fully expect to vote in 2012 – nonetheless sold the country a bill of goods in his campaign when he promised to return civility and peace to Washington. Civility and peace won't return to Washington. (For one, Rupert Murdoch has no interest in that happening.)

These things don't turn around quickly, and I'm not sure there's much impetus in this country to steer it back into calm waters. Yes, there's the Jon Stewart Rally to Restore Sanity; there's New York's independent Mayor Michael Bloomberg's quest to support moderate Republicans and Democrats across the country; there are groups that try to hold non-partisan, intelligent conversations on topics of mutual interest. But we are a nation of more than 300 million people; it will take more than a couple million to turn this ship around.

When evangelist Billy Graham was trying to get audiences to make a commitment to Christ, he would begin with tales of political strife and natural disasters right off the newspapers. Then he would tell people that this showed things were getting worse, that the end of the world was nigh, so they'd better make their peace with their creator or it might be too late and they'd spend all eternity in hell with no cable TV.

It was a cheap ploy of Graham's, but it worked for many people. It was predicated on his audience not knowing that the newspapers have always been filled with tales of serial murderers and devastating hurricanes. Read The Devil in the White City. Read Sin in the Second City. Read Roman history. Heck, read the Bible. These things are always in the news because they're always happening. There have always been people doing bad things, and there has always been weather.

I think Christianity can stand or fall without Graham-like deception. And I think American politics can do without the deception of the Roves and Tea Partiers who treat politics like a game. If the new Right were honest about what it wanted and offered realistic ways of accomplishing it, then fine. People could vote for their plans or against them and we could get on with self-governing life in our republic. But so much of the right-wingers' political speech these days is outright lies (about Obama, about economics, about their own moral hypocrisy) that I can't accept them as legitimate players in the national debate.

I can't accept them, but that doesn't mean that I don't accept the fact that they are players in the national debate. They might not have truth or wisdom on their side, but the Tea Party has an audience for the tales they spin.

Because Americans are dreamers.

Bill Maher's Weekly Christine O'Donnell Bomb

Sadly, this one will still leave a frightening percentage of our population scratching their heads wondering what she said that's so controversial, because they themselves believe the impossible, that the planet is 6,000 years old. Nonetheless, people with even rudimentary science literacy should know that they don't want to vote to put this person into office.



Thanks to Bill Maher for continuing the pressure.

The GOP's Pledge to Bankrupt America

They're promising $3.8 trillion in new debt?

And here I thought the Democrats might be overselling themselves when they warned that the GOP wanted to return us to the mistaken policies that ran the country into the ground in the first eight years of this decade.

But it turns out, they really do.

Christine O'Donnell Animated by Taiwan

Another in the over-the-top great animated "explainers" from Taiwan.

Jörg Haider and the Right-Wing Gay Connection

"Jörg Haider war nicht schwul" reads a cover line of Germany's leading gay magazine, Männer (see image, right). In English, that headline means "Jörg Haider was not gay."

If you believe Wikipedia, then it's illegal, following an Austrian court ruling, to call the late nationalist Austrian politician gay or to say he had male lovers. But I'm not Austrian, and I don't always believe Wikipedia, so I don't have to change my opinion.

Today, the English-language online news site Austrian Independent reports that a member of one of Haider's right-wing parties, Vienna Freedom Party official Gerald Ebinger, had used Haider's alleged homosexuality as a selling point when trying to get gay Austrians to support his party. This led to an argument with officials from the party that Haider created after leaving the Freedom Party, but that's too uninteresting to recount here.

My own probably safe guess is that Haider was gay. Rumors of his sexuality apparently followed him for many years, and he famously died after crashing his VW Phaeton following a visit to a local gay bar. I think it's very, very safe to say that xenophobic, ultra-right wing conservative politicians don't visit gay bars to use the restroom or get directions.

I've read articles in gay publications expressing shock, yes shock, that there are gay right-wingers, but it doesn't surprise me, and the sooner people get over it and get real, the better off we'll be. As a friend of mine said back at the University of Wisconsin in the 1980s, just because you're gay doesn't mean you can't hate communism. (A corollary is that just because you hate communism doesn't mean you're a right-winger, but that's another blog post.) And just because you're gay, it doesn't mean you're sensitive, or smart, or nice. It might be nice if it were otherwise, but that's the truth. People are people.

One would think we've seen enough right-wing politicians and political activists come out of the woodwork and come out of the closet to make us realize that one's sexuality doesn't dictate one's politics. I'm gay, but my politics straddle center-Left to center-Right. True, I won't vote for a far-Right candidate, but that's because I was raised in a good family and a fine church, not just because I love my partner. I've never been tempted to become a Log Cabin Republican, because I think the Republicans have turned their backs on any real semblance of moderation. Or science and rationality, for that matter. But I have known Log Cabin Republicans, and I respect them, if not their faith in their party.

But David Brock. Larry "I'm still not gay" Craig. J. Edgar Hoover. Edward L. Schrock. Hell, go back to Ernst Rohm, who was done in by a little wacko named Adolf Hitler. this is no longer something that should surprise people. Ideas and political philosophies matter. Sexuality shouldn't.

I'll leave you with the image to the left. Simply because I like it. And it in no way makes me right-wing.

It's Getting Harder and Harder not to Admit that Obama's a Success

Elena Kagan. Sonia Sotomayor. Health-care reform. Financial industry regulatory reform. A recovering economy.

One can only listen to the steady drumbeat of the anti-Obama forces for so long before reality slips in despite their best efforts. Barack Obama came into office facing unprecedented challenges – challenges is a nice word; disasters is more accurate. The economy was practically in free-fall. The government's regulatory capabilities had been utterly gutted by the Bush administration and a quarter-century of Reaganism. America was distrusted and in many places loathed around the world. Domestic politics were artificially rigged into an angry culture war that served no good purpose but to deliver votes to the GOP. The U.S. Supreme Court was controlled by the far-Right. Even the president's (and my) baseball team, the White Sox, were suffering ignominy.

Today, many on the Right, and even many in the middle – who like to think of themselves as independent but in this case at least are just parroting what they're told by shallow newsreaders – write off President Obama as a failure. Disingenuously, they point to much of the astroturf noise that they themselves have created as evidence of Obama's unpopularity and his uselessness in the White House.

There have certainly been times when I've wished Obama would move faster or would take down the do-nothing GOP in Congress. But then there are these moments, like today, when I realize something. He's already an historic success.

He's put two respected – albeit not uncontroversial, but who cares? – women on the U.S. Supreme Court. He's had historic legislative wins (with no small help from my own U.S. Representative, a certain Nancy Pelosi) in health care and financial reform. He's had a lot of smaller but still important legislative wins (student loans, for example). He might not be a radical (thank goodness). But he is shaping up to be a successful liberal president.

The Right can hope for a turnaround in this November's elections. I'm sure they'll get significant gains; but if they do it on the campaigns they've been running so far, then those are ill-gotten gains, because they're based on lies. And Obama will still be in the White House. They might be thinking that a strengthened GOP will be something Obama will have to deal with, and won't that be something? But in reality, the GOP will have to deal with President Barack Obama.

And they might as well prepare themselves for the next wave of Obama's agenda: Immigration reform. Don't ask, don't tell. Withdrawal from Iraq. The White Sox in the World Series.

Get used to losing, GOP.

Oh, and his middle name is Hussein.

Obama's Birth Certificate, Even if the Lunatics Ignore It

Courtesy of the LA Times, here's a link to President Obama's birth certificate. Just figured as many bloggers as possible should post this, so the wingnuts have fewer and fewer excuses to say they've never seen proof.

The so-called "birthers" movement is so crazed and ridiculous, what does this say about GOP congressional members who can't bring themselves to denounce the movement? They're all such products of the power-by-any-means school of Republican tricks that none of them have the guts to simply challenge the wingnuts in their town hall meetings and tell them that they're lunatics, they're flat our wrong, and they should return to reality and stop wasting our time. In those words -- not nicely, not respecting their "intelligence"; be brave and let 'em have it.

After all, any GOP congressperson who doesn't realize that every time a "birther" erupts on the public stage the Democrats cement thousands more votes -- well, that GOPer is too ignorant to survive long.