Goodbye To Most of That
Freeman, Neal B.
Goodbye to Most of That On the road in a changing America. By Neal B. Freeman Y ork, maine—I’ve been down this road before. I first made the drive from York to San Francisco...
...Is she, Lord help her, counting on me to rescue her from the four allbeef patties in the dungaree buns...
...Everybody has a tough first lap around the national political track...
...What if that’s true...
...at the end of a notably high-carb meal, Biker Boy drifts out to the parking lot, kisses Mom, ties his birthday swag neatly to the back of his hog and chuffs off into the Indiana night...
...The Buckley coalition, cemented by the anti-Communist cause, worked as a unified political force until the fall of the Soviet Union and for some years beyond...
...If a recession can be detected with the naked eye, sorry nBC, but there’s not much bad news to report and none at all for the folks who dig things and drill things and grow things...
...You’ve heard the marketing motto, “What hap pens in vegas, stays in vegas...
...His only conceit is that he thinks he’s a principled politician, which is not quite right...
...He’s fun to be around and his word is good...
...John McCain seems fully engaged only when going abroad in search of monsters to destroy...
...A voice for peace and reason in the Middle East www.civilcourageprize.org November 2008 THe amerIcaN sPecTaTor 27...
...half a century...
...Biden, now celebrated for rising magnificently from his bluecollar roots, once described his dad as the bestdressed sales manager in town...
...Or rich and poor, gay and straight, straight social impulse, the politics of ideological whim...
...Forget his “discretionary” war and the incalculable costs, both strategic and economic, it will incur...
...Not to belabor the point, but another example of McCain’s confusion of attitude with principle is his signaturecampaignagainstcongressionalearmarks...
...Others see it as between blacks and The state can no longer afford the politics of whites...
...He’s never run anything bigger than a law review, and the questions about him, your correspondent can confirm, still swirl across the fruited plain...
...If he wins, he’s president...
...Sorry, but whenever I get anywhere near Chicago I’m reminded of richard Jeni’s explanation of how the city got started: “a bunch of people in new York said, ‘Gee, I’m enjoying the crime and the poverty, but it just isn’t cold enough...
...The rest of us will get a town, techie and farmer, and the varied interests describer in chief...
...Or: but about this family thing— what’s up with that brother who lives in the hut in exurban Nairobi...
...By Neal B. Freeman Y ork, maine—I’ve been down this road before...
...A popular attitude by most evidence, but not a principle...
...Big-time grain operations, hour after hour, both sides of the road, with soybeans and sunflowers and other specialty crops mixed in...
...By the time the Fighting Irish band shakes down the thunder from the sky, I’m ready to hit a San Diego doofus myself...
...Not just in one election, but in two, he persuaded the entire conservative movement to stand with him...
...These are not the usual concerns lingering in the final weeks of a presidential campaign...
...book out of it...
...Perhaps that collar was something in a nice oxford blue with French cuffs...
...Not just in one election, but in two, he persuaded the entire conservative movement to stand with him—even as he took a series of Great Leaps Forward...
...With all of her upside, Sarah also brings great risk...
...as a delegate from WaSP nation I have observer status only, but, I tell you, it’s a near-spiritual experience...
...I had never thought of Pennsylvania and ohio as one end of the farm belt, but for the better part of two hundred miles it’s corn, corn, and more corn...
...My advice is to go west, young man, There comes that moment in road life when you but not all the way...
...As I write these words Bush has just nationalized the residential real estate market through the takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac...
...no, I think it’s more the one between those who care what the New York likely that the future will unfold first, both the Times says about them and those who don’t...
...The nicest town in the U.S., hands down, is elkhart, Indiana...
...The unfunded liability of the Bush drug benefit—and that’s after premiums, co-pays, and all projectable revenues—is already at $17.2 trillion...
...Today, of course, the appropriate response to a New York Times story would be, “Wow...
...Hillary did, losing most of the caucus states (!) this year to a no-name, noaccount junior senator...
...I should disclose that I know her a little with Chili’s...
...The fusionist movement relied from the outset on the force of moral commitment generated by religious conservatives, while neither of the other coalition partners, foreign policy hard-liners and free-market absolutists, were consistently adherent to traditional values...
...Or: but there seems to be more change here than a Bolshevik could stand today, more hope than a red-mopped urchin could contemplate tomorrow...
...And it was equally clear that the foreign policy hard-liners, then as now, were smart and vocal but a bit thin on the ground and never likely to be a player in organizational politics...
...Cleveland won’t be trapping many tourists anytime soon, but if you find yourself in the area, check out the rock & roll Hall of Fame...
...It was Kingsley amis who first noted the similarity between women and russians—“if Neal b. freemaN you did exactly what they wanted all the time you were being realistic and constructive and promoting the cause of peace...
...The bark smells like butterscotch...
...valuable travel tips, unavailable elsewhere at any price...
...of the whites and browns and blacks among its citizenry...
...When did it become part of the American Dream to live in November 2008 THe amerIcaN sPecTaTor 23 Goodbye To mosT of THaT government housing...
...The planted axiom in McCain’s campaign is that, while Sen...
...Myself, good and the bad, in its neighbor to the east, I’ve always been an O’Hara man...
...Over the past 20 years, Obama has held a series of brief, small-beer jobs, all of them in the nonprofit November 2008 THe amerIcaN sPecTaTor 25 Goodbye To mosT of THaT sector, which is another way of saying that he has And thus the choice you face on November 4, a made a living out of the economic value created by choice between Too New and Too Old, a choice somebody else...
...If only...
...and if you’re wondering about the name of the band, yes, I was the white guy...
...The missus and I are enjoying a late supper (that would be 7:45 elkhart time) in a deserted applebee’s when a second party saunters in— four biker dudes comprehensively pierced and inked, trailed timidly by a forty-fivish woman...
...By the time we reach Clear Lake, that toddlin’ town, domestic tranquility has been restored...
...For them, economic concerns were subordinate to social concerns...
...I now understand why head coach Charlie Weis has never returned to the pros...
...If form holds, Sarah will be stumbling and crumbling by October...
...a single vignette, drawn from a stuffed folder in the mental file...
...Hidden And then, and then…and then along came in that list of cholesterol palaces is a gem...
...As the world now knows from his writings, he was relentlessly analytical...
...Then he nationalized prescription drugs for senior citizens, which represented a monumental achievement for liberal ideology...
...If he doesn’t, perhaps he can find satisfaction in having taken a beating for his party...
...The rest of us will Feelings...
...How did he manage to keep all the partners inside the coalition, sullen but not quite mutinous...
...everywhere you see signs of mines reopened, wells uncapped, and the commodities boom in full swing...
...The only real money between a TR Republican and (I guess) a Kennedy came when he found the literary sub ject of a lifetime: himself...
...She said the same thing, with more accuracy, about Barack Obama...
...As the junior member of that yet-to be-vast conspiracy, I drew the short straw and the long route...
...He’s running to be ask, would a man who hasn’t accomplished anything write about president, and he’ll get a helluva in two autobiographies...
...We’ll give McCain the benefit of the doubt and presume that he likes the dying part better than the Commie part...
...She will embolden McCain’s best instincts and inspire his inner reformer...
...tion as VP...
...a combination love slave and short-order cook...
...Tooling through Scranton, we scan the sidewalks for the ghost of Joe Biden’s dad...
...Barack Obama is a the spirit of the trailblazer and the grit of the describer...
...But the tactical imperatives of the day, especially the need to resist Soviet expansionism, prevailed...
...Maybe feel...
...For reasons that escape me, he tells everybody who will listen that his favorite fictional character is Robert Jordan from the Hemingway novel For Whom the Bell Tolls...
...To them, serious political personalities on the right were ontologically inconceivable...
...Times change...
...He is all moral sensibility, without system, without intellectual base...
...I got to know him a bit in Washington and he’s a guy’s guy, full of wit and vinegar...
...Limestone cliffs, crashing falls, bird- and fishstuffed wetlands, an area so pristine as to justify the local poet’s judgment that it is soul-nourishing to “get out into the silent places...
...Go Sarah Palin...
...For those of you some years removed from high school English, Jordan is the American volunteer in the Spanish Civil War who opts for death in a hopeless and effectively pro-Communist cause...
...the apodictic mode...
...I have seen the future and I’m pretty sure it’s not California...
...has already published two autobiographies, both of them commercially suc-He’s not running to accomplishcessful...
...Even the people who embrace his “message” of hope and change add a “but,” such as: but the only old friends we seem to know about are the convict, the terrorist, and that hate-pretzel of a preacher...
...What Barack felt about this, what he felt about get a describer in chief...
...If you’ve never been a tree hugger, I recommend that you start with the Ponderosa pine...
...The fans are worshipping the coach...
...at the pep rally before the home opener against San Diego State, twenty thousand fans bow metronomically, forming a “W” with their fingers and thumbs...
...The word for it is awesome, in the pure, pre-valley Girl sense...
...He’s running to be president, and he’ll get its efforts to balance past and future, city and a helluva book out of it...
...Goodbye to Most of That On the road in a changing America...
...Neal b. freeman is Chairman of The Blackwell Corporation and can be reached at nealfreeman@ blackwellcorp.com...
...He’s an honorable politician, clearly, but he has more attitudes than principles, the difference being that a politician with attitudes can be ideologically scammed...
...But even other, less tendentious observers were skeptical as to whether Buckley, as the infamous NR office memo put it, could make the “Holy Rollers lie down with the high rollers...
...South Dakota, where one man’s mesa is another man’s butte, is the real deal...
...Do something...
...that, what he almost felt about this, what he should Democrat, an election between two career legisla have felt about that...
...With a layered economy, built on the O’Hara saw the world around him separating itself sedimental foundation of successive booms in cleanly into two groups—people who do things energy, telecommunications, and finance, with and people who describe things...
...and you don’t have to take my word for any of this...
...nothing serious...
...Hmmm, is she a hostage...
...John McCain...
...An attitudinal conservatism would oppose the earmark and send the money to the executive branch...
...We encounter a bit of turbulence just outside Webster City, Iowa...
...Such was the force of Buckley’s personal charisma and rhetorical thrust that many rightleaning citizens suspended their disbelief and declaredthemselvesourco-conspirators.Moresober political observers, including those now known as the mainstream media but then known simply as The Media, were dismissive...
...Whatever I write now will sound like 26 THe amerIcaN sPecTaTor November 2008 Neal b. freemaN time-capsule stuff by the time you read it, but here was my thinking way back in the summer of 2008...
...Point Two: Sarah will reshuffle the deck by stunning the media, caffeinating the base, arresting (at least momentarily) the migration of Hillary voters, and intriguing that huge swath of the country that doesn’t give a damn about politics 10 months of the year...
...Maybe she won’t...
...Don’t cry for McCain...
...After tors face to face at last with those “tough choices” 500 pages of this picaresque they pretend to relish, both of whom seem likely to monologue, the reader is yield to inflation (and mete out the concomitant moved to scream at the page, punishment to savers and investors) rather than “Barack, we know how you swallowing a stiff dose of fiscal medicine...
...The coalition was, if not unprincipled, at least fragile and susceptible to fracture...
...John McCain is a voracious if undisciplined reader, and he insists on sharing his literary enthusiasms...
...But on your list of, say, ten things, you must include a notre Dame football game...
...I didn’t bother to make Point Four...
...ever wonder how far a couple married long enough to have eight grandchildren can stand being cooped up in a small automobile...
...It’s all there—stuff from Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis, Janis Joplin’s Porsche, Jimi Hendrix’s axe, Mick Jagger’s costumes—the full panoply of your misspent youth...
...How did Bush do it...
...Courtly James Burnham, the oldest and wisest of the Buckleyites, could be heard muttering that a cause depending simultaneously on social conservatives and free-marketeers smacked of an “unprincipled coalition,” which in Burnham’s lexicon was the least promising form of political life...
...another entry for your must-do list...
...It’s useful to remember that Ronald Reagan, the professional actor, was rarely emotive...
...I won’t drown you in numbers but consider this: The unfunded liability in the Social Security system, about which we have been perspiring heavily for 30 years, now stands at $13.6 trillion...
...Bill Clinton did, with that apparently career-killing keynote address to the 1988 convention...
...Point One: The suits—Pawlenty, Romney, Lieberman—are all fine fellows but will be unable to help McCain move off 42–45 percent of the vote...
...Whatever the marketing strategy may have been, though, Brooks made himself one big sale...
...Good luck...
...one glaring omission: there’s no mention of the great late 24 THe amerIcaN sPecTaTor November 2008 Fifties band, The Zebras...
...Looking back over the last eight years, it seems obvious that George W. Bush has been a vastly underrated politician...
...With the indis 22 THe amerIcaN sPecTaTor November 2008 pensable help of his National Review colleagues Frank Meyer, Brent Bozell, and William Rusher, Buckley had stitched together an assemblage of social, traditional, and national defense conservatives and then grandly pronounced them a “movement...
...Some people happen first in California...
...Buckley, that master of political theatre, knew just when to tap-dance off stage...
...and women...
...By the time you hit Wyoming, the farming has turned to ranching, with one Dances with Wolves set eliding into the next...
...The Southwestern Cobb is reliably and like her a lot...
...Biden did, pratfalling twice...
...When I say that the coalition was stitched together, I don’t mean that it was tied snugly with rawhide strips...
...And he has been...
...I mean that it was tacked up with a basting stitch...
...What, you might reasonably great things...
...Which leaves you, the reader, in a unique situation: for the first time in your life you have no conservative candidate for whom to vote...
...and addicted, night people and day people...
...First, he nationalized education, a constitutional stretch by any reckoning and the realization of a liberal dream running back almost Looking back over the last eight years, it seems obvious that George W. Bush has been a vastly underrated politician...
...I sometimes think that David Brooks cooked up that “national greatness” nonsense with a consumer market of one in mind...
...But even if she does, we have been reminded— as have the media and the powerbrokers—that there is Sarah Palin will reshuffle the deck by stunning the media, caffeinating the base, arresting (at least momentarily) the migration of Hillary voters, and intriguing that huge swath of the country that doesn’t give a damn about politics 10 months of the year...
...It was not until the New York Times began referring to us as a “movement” that we knew we had arrived...
...Let’s go west.’” Carly Fiorina, the senior McCain aide and former Hewlett-Packard executive, blurted out the gaffish truth that John McCain is not fit to be a corporate CEO...
...Stevens may waste the money on a bridge to nowhere, a nameless Transportation Department bureaucrat will spend it wisely in the public interest...
...You know that list of the hundred things you must do before you die...
...A principled conservatism would oppose the earmark and return the money to the taxpayer...
...McCain’s problem, from the conservative perspective, is that he has no framework, ideological or philosophical, into which he can feed experience and from which he can adduce policy...
...If only, my no better time than the end of a trip to slip into friends...
...The late Those are the indulgences of youth and wealth Herman Kahn used to tell me that the critical dis-and California is past its prime with the bills of tinction, the one that really matters in public life, is boom now coming due...
...He’s not running to accomplish great cowboy, Colorado has shown early promise in things...
...not so long It is the universal temptation to divide the ago, whatever happened in america tended to human tribe into two neat categories...
...can either starve or pick a logo from the bill board misleadingly labeled, “Food...
...It was part of Buckley’s genius to see among the shards of a broken post-Eisenhower politics the makings of a new conservative majority...
...The apple bee’s staff crowds in and breaks into song and it becomes clear that Mom is treating Biker Boy and his friends to a gala dinner...
...I first made the drive from York to San Francisco back in the proto-conservative era, running political errands along the way for one William F. Buckley Jr...
...She’d be a great vice president...
...I use “great” here in the sense that it paid enough to buy my first car, an aquamarine, chick-magnet Ford convertible...
...At age 46, he Barack Obama is a describer...
...The novelist John Colorado...
...Or: but when he’s untethered from the teleprompter, he seems to float in rhetorical space, a man of no fixed intellectual address...
...Spearfish Canyon, located near the old Homestake gold strike in western South Dakota...
...Point Three: Should McCain somehow manage to win, Sarah will embolden his best instincts and inspire his inner reformer...
...Who says that ethanol scam isn’t working...
...Where I come from, they threaten the wife and kids...
...Civil Courage Prize for steadfast resistance to evil at great personal risk The Trustees of The Train Foundation Congratulate The 2008 Civil Courage Prize Honoree Ali Salem Author and Journalist, Egypt...
...I speak with authority...
...a previous visitor, Frank Lloyd Wright, said of Spearfish, “How is it that I’ve heard so much about the Grand Canyon, when this is even more miraculous...
...It was also clear from the earliest days that the traditionalists’ moral commitment never ran unreservedly to support of the free market...
...All of us young conservatives, one way or another, were making our way to the Goldwater convention...
...The answer is brilliant campaigns, textbook brilliant, followed by governance that destroyed the base...
...now, I strongly sussee the fundamental division as that between men pect, only the bad things will happen there first...
...I lobbied persistently for her selec good...
...Experience would not seem to support McCain’s confidence on this point, but he labors on, not seeking to limit the scope of government but rather seeking to clarify exactly which government office will allocate the funds...
...Our coalition needed a nip here and a tuck there, and I became the designated nipper-tucker...
...a latent conservative constituency out there, waiting for the spark of leadership, listening expectantly for the sound of the trumpet...
Vol. 41 • November 2008 • No. 9
