Kayak to Alaska?

AS CONGRESS continues to kneel backward against a solution to the economic gloom, the McCain ticket faces a growing political storm over his erratic comments and the presence of Sarah Palin - who was recruited by the GOP deep thinkers as his Pocahontas.  With her vacant response to each question raised by the media she has betrayed her poor entry level grasp of worldly issues.  Some of her allies in the GOP are getting jittery as her popularity numbers sink.  Some, like Kathleen Parker of the conservative National Review, want her to hop onto her kayak and paddle home. Palin, wrote Parker, is "clearly out of her league."  She added:  "If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall St. on her own."  

McCain is having none of it, complaining that a hard question  from a voter that  tripped up Palin during a campaign stop was "gotcha journalism".  Cool. 

Stuntsmanship

ACCORDING TO the Sunday Times of London,  the McCain camp is passing the word that Sarah Palin's pregnant daughter Bristol and her boyfriend Levi Johnston may decide to get married before the election.  The paper quotes a McCain insider as saying it would be a great boost for the campaign because "you would have every TV camera there." Right. 

        Considering all of the dumb things that have happened so far, beginning with the insane choice of an Alaskan hockey mom, a double shotgun wedding would be well within the context of  political stunts.  What else might we expect in the campaign's remaining month to extract  McCain's daily gaffes from his presidential image?  Some possibilities: 

         PALIN and her entire family will parachute into a World Series game in prime time.

         MCCAIN and Joe Lieberman will reopen Wolfies, the once-popular deli in Miami  Beach, promoting a surge of franchises throughout pacified Iraq. 

         PALIN will invite all of her skeptics to a special showing of a remote Russian fishing   village  while explaining that, unfortunately, you can't see the Arctic circle from her front           porch  because it is really only an imaginary line on the map.

          MCCAIN will try to sell his Straight Talk Express bus on eBay and spend the last two  weeks of his campaign  traveling around in one of his 13 cars to prove that he is a common  man..        

        PALIN  will meet with the president of Iceland for a second time to prove that she is a    work in progress on the  benefits of permafrost. 

       THE  Republican National Committee, with McCain's eager consent, will hire Tina Fey to stand in for Palin in the final week of the campaign.  Fortunately for McCain,  Tina doesn't           do a good impersonation of him.  But they say she's working on it.  

        

      On with the wedding!

         

            

       

   

To the barricades!

TED DIADIUN,  the Plain Dealer's conservative ombudsman and primordial  company man,  manned the barricades Sunday in a column that shed little additional light on the internal workings of the machinery that demoted Donald Rosenberg as the paper's classical music critic.  Defending  editor Susan Goldberg's  decision to separate Rosenberg from the Cleveland Orchestra reviews, Diadiun concluded that it was in the best interests of the newspaper  and its readers - "a decision that is her right and responsibility to make."   I won't quibble with that.  But it does lose some of its authority  when it appears in Diadiun's weekly column that is called "Reader Representative."   Ted Diadiun, for goodness sake?  

An American hero

THE LATE John Seiberling was remembered Saturday with soaring affection in the spacious sanctuary of the Bath Church-United Church of Christ.  The memorial service for the former Akron congressman, an unapologetic liberal Democrat,  drew more then 200 friends, many from his former Washington staff as well as the family and  others  from his 14th District that he served   so honorably  for eight terms.  The ten speakers who rose to the pulpit described him in terms reserved for noble giants: Courageous... Prinicipled... Unyielding to his opponents.  "A man of fortitude and with a fabulous mind," said  Loretta Neumann,  one of Seiberling's key assistants in his Washington office who tirelessly  directed the steps leading to the service.

Grand  embellishments of the lives of the dead are not hard to come by.  However, in Seiberling's case the recognition of  his accomplishments in a day of cynical and even depraved distortions of the truth were not only accurate - but fully deserved. He set a  standard for committed public service that few others can ever hope to achieve. A determined environmentalist, he is regarded as the father of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, working across the aisle with Rep. Ralph Regula, the Navarre Republican, to win White House and congressional support.  Appearing  in park uniform at the pulpit, CVNP superintendent John Debo  solemnly credited Seiberling with "battling the obstacles" to preserve 33,000 acres for the benefit of the millions of visitors to the park today. He concluded by lifting his hat that  had been out of view behind  the podium. "I honor an American hero," he said. "Our hats are off to you."

Seiberling's remarkable accomplishments extended well beyond the CVNP.  He played a central role in sponsoring legislation that created the Alaska Lands Act of 1980 that preserved 100 million acres in the state that is creating such a fuss these days with a vice presidential nominee whose views on conservation seem to change  with each sunrise.    

None of this was easy and certainly the opposition to his environmental goals grew, particularly in Alaska,  where the hard-liners accused him of carpetbagging - and worse.  One can imagine how it would play  today among those who insist that destructive global warming is a myth generated by crazy liberals like Seiberling.  Not that he would care.

As a political writer who covered Seiberling on the homefront  throughout his tenure in Washington, I was always impressed by his low-key expression of his mission - "Mankind is my business" -  his dedication to the arts and his droll response to candidates who came at him for eight terms.  I covered the first debate he accepted with a Republican restaurant owner who wanted at least a half-dozen more.   The challenger was s0 quietly destroyed in the first one that I asked Seiberling why he had agreed to do  more. "If he wants to debate," Seiberling said seriously, "I can't very well ignore him. It wouldn't be right."  I said that would be fine, but this would be the last time that I would show up to report on such a mismatch.   Seiberling replied with a soft laugh.

But you can find the essence of the man in Saturday's printed program.  Here, we let him speak for himself:

              "We will never see the land as our ancestors did.  But we can understand

               what made it beautiful and why they lived and died to preserve it. And

               in preserving it for future generations, we will preserve something of

               ourselves.  If we all have an interest in this land, then we all have a stake 

               in its preservation.  There is no more worthwhile cause"...  

Striking preemptively

Talk about public indecency!   The McCain campaign released an Internet ad today that said McCain won the debate -" hands down"   Let's see.  the debate isn't until...um....tonight.  Oh, I see. It was a preemptive strike.  Right?    No, I don't see.  Still not used to the weirdly erratic elements in this campaign.    

Trick or treat

WELL, THEY'LL debate tonight,  although in the circus-like atmosphere of the McCain campaign, I can't be sure of anything anymore.    His flight to Washington presumably to officiate negotiations that were  well along anyway  was the biggest political grandstanding act since the late Gov. Rhodes, a master of such highly visible nonsense,  proposed building a bridge across Lake Erie at the Canadian taxpayers' expense.  Of course.

Now that McCain has chosen to barge in on a systemic financial crises that he discounted a week or so ago, it would not surprise me that he would take the next  logical step and rent an aircraft carrier to announce his "mission accomplished". 

 What is it with this fellow?   In crediting himself with "leadership" in resolving the looming disaster, McCain has clumsily prompted  both Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill to accuse  him of only making matters worse.  The official explanation from his campaign flacks for his decision to debate is that the senator is "optimistic that there has been sufficient progress".  But he assured the nation that he will return to Washington immediately after the debate to "ensure that all voices and interests" will be heard.  Mostly, his own.  

What TV channel are they watching?   One after another of  the weary participants are talking about a stalemate between the sides.  Meantime, another financial giant, Washington Mutual, took a hit.

It does appear to me that in crudely upstaging the president on the bailout as a bull in the china shop,  McCain has already assumed the acting- presidency for his very own self  to continue the miserable  series of mistakes of  the current incumbent.    Meantime, almost lost in the windstorm of his campaign was a positive note from Sarah Palin that she damn well has international experience.  She's got Canada's mostly barren Ogilvie Mountains on one side and a few Russian villages near the Arctic Circle just across the Bering Strait. Added to those strategic pluses for her, she now says she once met with Iceland's president.  

I want to scream.  It's getting to be more than I can process in one sitting.  So let me be the first to wish all of you a happy Halloween and get out of here for now! 

Watch the bouncing ball

THE BYLINE on the  Cleveland Cavaliers coverage in the Beacon Journal today will be vanishing soon. Brian Windhorst will assume the same role as the team's beat writer for the Plain Dealer on Oct. 6. In the daily ebb and flow of both papers' staffs, a familiar name will no longer be associated with the PD.   Stuart Warner, former columnist with the BJ who was a special projects editor for the PD, is out the door with whatever settlement the PD offered him. With growing evidence of interactive journalism, buyouts and early retirements,  readers will have to check their programs regularly to learn who is working for whom and who is not working at all.  

Rosenberg's wake in NY Times

THE NEW York Times picked up the beat today on the Plain Dealer's rendition of its longtime classical musical critic Donald Rosenberg.  In a lengthy report on Rosenberg's demotion that exceeded the paper's own spare announcement by a kilometer or two, the Times filled in much of the score while at the same time failing to get some clarifying words from Susan Goldberg, the paper's editor.  She was quoted as saying that she couldn't  discuss the issue because it was an "internal personnel matter." Oh? 

At this point, I should tell you that I was a colleague and friend of Don at the Beacon Journal, where he was an astute, sensitive and dedicated workaholic.  That friendship continues to this day. Make of it what you will. 

Having said that, I still must wonder about Goldberg's decision that was bound to raise suspicions that the mighty PD serves masters outside the newsroom, a matter that should alarm most caring journalists in a day when the newspaper business is in tattered retreat both in circulation and credibility.   We can hope that his dark event will not be picked up around the country as another Cleveland joke.    

Ghost in the attic

SADLY, THERE there was something terribly grotesque about President Bush's appearance before the TV cameras last night to tell us what we already knew - and what his administration should have known a long time ago.  As he recounted a Gothic tale of a "serious financial crises," "rescue effort" and "collapse",   he seemed to be a ghostly presence  returning to remind us that he once, by God,  served as leader of the free world before his own party (and the public) exiled him.  No longer the decider, he was now the faded outsider trying to explain, as best as his speechwriter could offer him to the public,  how America became impoverished by the sleight-of-hand Ponzi schemes of the highest rollers on Wall Street.  

But something in his presence had changed.  It lacked the bravado of his post-9/11 breast beating   when he promised to return the terrorists' war with our own war, defiantly asserting "Bring 'em on!" and later declaring the mission accomplished.  Who would he now "bring on"?  

And what mission could be accomplished by his authority  during the remaining days of his failed presidency?  

Even his pallid effort to reassure the nation was upstaged  by John McCain's theatrical decision to suspend his campaign, cancel his Friday night debate,  and return to Washington to cast his first vote in the Senate since - well, only the congressional archivists can recall the date.   

How bizarre.  In purporting to play a leadership role ,  McCain emerged as a Hollywood stunt man in the virtual reality of his perilous climb to the White House.  Did he really think that Obama would accept a few days off from his own schedule?    And did he really think that in the clumsy rearranging of the debate calendar that he could offer Sarah Palin more time for her on-the-job training on the path to the vice presidency?   Were the Democrats dumb enough to offer her a delay in her scheduled debate with Joe Biden?

If we can assume that that McCain has to be smarter than he sounds at times, the fallback position is that he is taking a lot of bad advice from the people around him - people who have a great stake in spoon-feeding him to the safe-keeping of the Oval Office.  That's the polite version.  And as each day passes I have to wonder what's under his $5,500 cosmetics that would tell us who John McCain really is.

I am Abe Zaidan and I approve this message. 

 

The fallout up front

AN EMAIL arrived this morning from a reader that narrowed the gravely stricken economy to a single voice that clearly defines the human fallout from the official guesswork, debates and costly high level thievery of our once plentiful resources.

To quote, in part:

             You have no idea the level of despair among the workers in our factory. 

             Our 401Ks have taken a huge beating this year, which is bad enough.  Our

             sales department failed to make its goal this quarter and we  are in the process of 

             cutting  overtime for non-salaried employes.  For most of them that is a loss

             of income of $200 a paycheck.  Our outside vendors are begging for work and 

             we have nothing to give them.  

              There are real faces on this crisis and I see them every day.   Let us hope Obama

              wins and do everything we can to make that happen.   BUT...then he must govern

              and help us find a way out of this mess.  We are in deep shit right now.  People are        

              struggling that I personally know.  We need FDR.  Let's hope his ghost is still

              lurking.