LAS14
LAS14's JournalI don't need this, but...
Apparently a lot of people do. (I and a friend once bonded on being "passionate about the golden mean." ) Can anyone think of a slogan that's more passionate than "A progressive that gets things done?" I'm personally energized by that.... but, like I said...
The Roosevelt Approach
By DAVID BROOKS
Dear Hillary, Jeb, Marco and John,
You all find yourselves running against a whirlwind. Hillary, for you the whirlwind is Bernie Sanders. For the rest of you it’s Donald Trump.
Either way, you’re running against a candidate who generates passionate intensity. At some level those candidates’ followers must know that there’s something wildly impractical about the candidacy they are fervently supporting. Trump has no actual policies and Sanders has little chance of getting his passed.
And yet the supporters don’t care. Sanders and Trump make them feel known. Finally, somebody is saying what they feel. Finally, somebody is outraged by the things that outrage them. There’s a deep passion embedded in the Trump and Sanders phenomena, arousing energy, magical thinking and some suspension of disbelief.
And the rest of you are basically asking voters to snap out of it. All of you, but especially you, Hillary, are asking voters to calm down and be pragmatic: Consider electability! Vote for the one who can get laws passed!
And it’s not working. In debates Sanders is uninhibited by the constraints of reality, so his answers are always bolder. Trump speaks from the id, not from any policy paper, so his answers are always more vivid.
The brute fact is you can’t beat passion with pragmatism. The human heart is not built that way. You can’t beat angry passion with bloodless calculation. If you’re going to have any chance against these hotheads, you have to set a rival and stronger emotional tone. I’d ask you to think of the ancient ideal of comradeship.
Many Americans feel like they are the victims of a slow-moving natural disaster. Sanders and Trump try to put the blame for this disaster on discrete groups of people — Wall Street or immigrants. But in reality it’s a natural disaster caused by structural forces — globalization, technological change, the dissolution of the family, racism.
A great nation doesn’t divide in times of natural disaster. It doesn’t choose leaders who angrily tear it apart. Instead, it chooses leaders like Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, leaders who radiate sunny confidence, joy and neighborliness.
You may think of neighborliness as a sentimental, soft virtue. And I suppose in times of peace, prosperity and ease it is a sweet and tender thing.
But look at what happens to neighbors when one friend is threatened or when times are hard. Then neighborliness takes on a different hue. Friends become comrades in arms.
That is what F.D.R. and Ike were able to do with their leadership styles. With fireside chats and golf jokes, they were neighborly even in times of great difficulty and stress. But they were also able to set an emotional tone that brought people together and changed the nature of Americans’ relationships with one another.
During their presidencies, the bonds of solidarity grew stronger and the country more formidable. They were able to cultivate a deep sense of unity, responsibility and sacrifice. They didn’t call for sacrifice as something painful, but as what one did for one’s friends.
I’d love to see one of you counter the Trump and Sanders emotional tones with a bold shift in psychology. This would be a shift toward the cheerful resolve of an F.D.R. or an Eisenhower.
Let Trump and Sanders shout, harangue and lecture. You respond to difficulty with warmth, confidence and optimism.
Let them deliver long, repetitive and uninterrupted lectures. You converse, interact, chat and listen.
Let them stand angry and solitary. You run as part of a team, a band of brothers, with diverse advisers and buddies joining you onstage at event after event.
Let them assert that all our problems can be solved if other people sacrifice — the immigrants or the top 1 percent. You call for shared sacrifice. The rich can give more in taxes, but the rich, the middle class and the poor can all give more in civic engagement.
Let them emphasize the cold relations of business (Trump) or of the state (Sanders). You emphasize the warm bonds of neighbor helping neighbor. While they dwell in the land of impersonal bureaucracies, you point out that the primary task before us to repair the social fabric — the basic respect diverse Americans have for one another.
Let them preach pessimism. You emphasize a warm nationalism — a basic confidence that America is not going down in decline, that it is still the nation best positioned to dominate the 21st century, that confidence is a better guide than anger or fear.
Sanders and Trump have adopted emotional tones that are going to offend and exhaust people over time. Watching the G.O.P. South Carolina debate I got the impression that Trump’s exhaustion moment is at hand.
The candidate who has the audacity to change the emotional tone of this whole election will win the White House and have a shot at rebinding the civic fabric of this nation.
A personal memory of Hillary
I was advised to cross post this. In most forums I've been in, cross posting was frowned on. It this is illegal, I hope this is the one that is hidden instead of the one in General Discussion: Primaries
***************
Hello All!
I’m writing to friends and family and other contacts to share one side of the story about one of our presidential candidates, which may not be familiar to many, at least in the terms that I know them. A hundred years ago, I worked closely with a bright young Methodist student at Wellesley College, where I was serving as a teacher and Chaplain, one Hillary Rodham. She was then, and, I believe, still is a person of deep moral passion, notwithstanding press caricatures of her that have appeared in recent years with predictable regularity.
Hillary came to Wellesley as an enthusiastic “Goldwater Girl.” Hers was a dedicated voice of the Midwestern Right. Then she took the (at that time) required sophomore Bible course, and it changed her life. She was especially fond of Amos, texts such as 5:24, “Let justice roll down like waters.” And she did not just talk the talk.
One example. As president of the student government, she and a group of young women like her (I was a kind of back-row advisor to all this), wanted to address the mostly lily-white complexion of the student body. At that time there were, as I recall, 12 African-Americans in a student body of some 2000. The College’s administration wanted nothing to do with all this. Hillary took the lead with her group to raise money independently to pay for those African-American students to make recruiting trips to predominantly black high schools across the country. Not only had those schools never been visited by Wellesley College recruiters before, they were unknown to the Admissions Office. That project turned out to be a minor success. But my point here is not minor successes, but Hillary’s impressive moral passion and her eagerness to act on that passion.
I have kept close tabs on her personal and political trajectories ever since. Notwithstanding her being the object of sometimes vicious attacks (tell me that sexism is not alive and well in this country) and notwithstanding mistakes of her own along the way, I believe that the faith that she discovered in Amos and the moral passion she exemplified at Wellesley College have not left her. If anything, given the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, that faith and that moral passion have deepened and become the driving force of all she does. I believe that she has added the wisdom of spiritual depth, too, which sometimes comes with maturity. Did you notice that when asked, during one of the New Hampshire debates, about spiritual influences on her life she spoke at length and with some conviction about how much she has learned from that great Catholic spiritual teacher of our time, Henri Nouwen?
I, of course, am not an unbiased witness. I affirm what I once saw, and I affirm what I now see. I have walked the streets of New Hampshire in her behalf and I support her current campaign financially.
I write only with this hope, that, as you continue to reflect about the current campaign, you will take into account her moral passion and her spiritual depth. She is much more than her popular detractors, even on the liberal side, make her out to be. I also believe that she has even more to offer. Her much vaunted “experience” is not something to shake a stick at, for example, not to speak of a certain wisdom she brings with her as a knowledgeable student of history. But those are themes for another day.
Thank you for reading!
This was written by the husband of LAS14, who was the Wellesley chaplain that Hillary mentioned in her graduation speech. She was the first student to give such a speech. It was the 60's and times they were a changin'. 
Bernie on Facebook (yes, this is a Hillary group post)
Why do I keep getting Bernie Sanders sponsored ads? Am I profiled somewhere erroneously? Or is Hillary's campaign just falling down on the job?
Personal memories of Hillary
Hello All!
I’m writing to friends and family and other contacts to share one side of the story about one of our presidential candidates, which may not be familiar to many, at least in the terms that I know them. A hundred years ago, I worked closely with a bright young Methodist student at Wellesley College, where I was serving as a teacher and Chaplain, one Hillary Rodham. She was then, and, I believe, still is a person of deep moral passion, notwithstanding press caricatures of her that have appeared in recent years with predictable regularity.
Hillary came to Wellesley as an enthusiastic “Goldwater Girl.” Hers was a dedicated voice of the Midwestern Right. Then she took the (at that time) required sophomore Bible course, and it changed her life. She was especially fond of Amos, texts such as 5:24, “Let justice roll down like waters.” And she did not just talk the talk.
One example. As president of the student government, she and a group of young women like her (I was a kind of back-row advisor to all this), wanted to address the mostly lily-white complexion of the student body. At that time there were, as I recall, 12 African-Americans in a student body of some 2000. The College’s administration wanted nothing to do with all this. Hillary took the lead with her group to raise money independently to pay for those African-American students to make recruiting trips to predominantly black high schools across the country. Not only had those schools never been visited by Wellesley College recruiters before, they were unknown to the Admissions Office. That project turned out to be a minor success. But my point here is not minor successes, but Hillary’s impressive moral passion and her eagerness to act on that passion.
I have kept close tabs on her personal and political trajectories ever since. Notwithstanding her being the object of sometimes vicious attacks (tell me that sexism is not alive and well in this country) and notwithstanding mistakes of her own along the way, I believe that the faith that she discovered in Amos and the moral passion she exemplified at Wellesley College have not left her. If anything, given the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, that faith and that moral passion have deepened and become the driving force of all she does. I believe that she has added the wisdom of spiritual depth, too, which sometimes comes with maturity. Did you notice that when asked, during one of the New Hampshire debates, about spiritual influences on her life she spoke at length and with some conviction about how much she has learned from that great Catholic spiritual teacher of our time, Henri Nouwen?
I, of course, am not an unbiased witness. I affirm what I once saw, and I affirm what I now see. I have walked the streets of New Hampshire in her behalf and I support her current campaign financially.
I write only with this hope, that, as you continue to reflect about the current campaign, you will take into account her moral passion and her spiritual depth. She is much more than her popular detractors, even on the liberal side, make her out to be. I also believe that she has even more to offer. Her much vaunted “experience” is not something to shake a stick at, for example, not to speak of a certain wisdom she brings with her as a knowledgeable student of history. But those are themes for another day.
Thank you for reading!
LAS14 is posting this on behalf of her husband, who wrote it.
Hillary's web site - hope a campaign person follows this group
I've been giving to Hillary regularly and am always annoyed that I get directed to a page that wants me to save my giving info and there's no way to get off of it except to back arrow. Some folks may not be familiar with that. And as a programmer I'm annoyed with the bad/coercive web design.
Hoping a campaign staff member sees this!
Do you think they look at this group?
Profile Information
Member since: Tue Feb 9, 2016, 02:20 PMNumber of posts: 13,790