Jane Mayer and Paul Krugman

Jane Mayer's piece in the current The New Yorker, "Schmooze or Lose" (August 27, 2012) kept me awake last night.

First I woke up on my right side, then my left.

I like Jane Mayer, I think her heart's in the right place. I saw her interviewed not long after 9/11 and she had some of the same thoughts and feelings I had about our misugided war on terror, writing a book about it in 2008, "The Dark Side." She didn't go quite as far as I did. She didn't suggest that George Bush were he a real man might have flown to Afghanistan on September 19, 2001 and sought  out Osama bin Laden to talk things over, but she did package a number of quasi-revelations about the Bush-Cheney years in the manner satisfying to a liberal constituency.

{You can hear Amy Goodman's conversation with Mayer "The Dark Side." Toward the end, when Amy asks Jane whether or not Bush and Cheney should be tried for "war crimes" you'll get the picture of how far Mayer does and does not go.}

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/7/18/the_dark_side_jane_mayer_now

"Schmooze or Lose" explores Obama's relationship with money and his alleged distaste of fund-raising, set against the larger tableau of the Supreme Court's Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and the heavy, heavy money that now comes flowing into the process from fewer & fewer sources. 

Here's the scene: Obama's a private man, would rather be at home with his wife & kids than at a dinner with rich people. While most of the money that elected him in 2008 came from small doners, big-buck Leftists like George Soros and Penny Pritzker and David Geffen--all of whom contributed mightily to Obama's 2008 campaign--now feel they hadn't had enough access to the President since, that they hadn't got what they paid for. Meanwhile on the Right, the Supreme Court decision unleashed big money men like Adelson to pour major bucks into SUPER PAC's created by guys like Karl Rove. The Dem's are conflicted, to their credit. In Mayer's tale, it's one-man, one-vote (Obama) v. the protector of Supra-Rich (Romney),  though she does quote one Democratic billionaire who said, "I'm happy to spend, but not on Super PAC's. They don't seem like they should be legal." Then Mayer asks if he'd continue to withhold money if it meant Obama would lose. "I find it hard to believe Obama won't win," he said.

Paul Krugman's piece on Paul Ryan the Republican V-P nominee, "Galt, Gold and God" (A21) in today's The New York Times is really sad and really funny. Ryan's devotion to Ayn Rand and the ideas in Atlas Shrugged might be admirable if the ideas of Ayn Rand as expressed in Atlas Shrugged weren't so simplistic or, as Krugman writes, "sophmoric." If only Ryan had read War and Peace or Mark Twain on the robber barons, as it's possible to imagine Obama reading them, and took his worldview from them. 

Why isn't literature more influential in matters of state, in the the way we manage ourselves as human beings?