Sunday Discussion Group

There may be future transformational leaders in our midst, but the political atmosphere is such that the spiritual (yes, indeed) strength of such a person would be mocked and vilified, rather than admired. We adore idiots who are “extreme” and have no use for the moral voice which tells us we can do better. We want our toys and gadgets, not someone who tells us that we need to work to make the world a better place. Look at how Howard Dean is constantly vilified, and I don’t think he is a transformational leader, merely, like Truman, honest. Look at how Carter is demeaned, and all he is, is a moral voice. We might admire Mother Teresa, but we have the same level of admiration for the winner of “American Idol”.

This sounds bitter, but I think another generation of this, and we will sicken of ourselves, and maybe get a few real leaders. Do we need transformational leaders? Yes, because most people are not capable of lifting their heads up without a light to look at, and most people cannot formulate a vision of the future that isn’t centered around their next trip to Europe or their retirement plan.

I’m with Ed Stephan. Though Bobby was no saint, he was far superior to present-day politicians. My impression is Bernie Sanders comes closest to RFKs vision.

The thing that impressed me about JFK and RFK was their desire to help “average Americans” considering they were anything but.

The United States of America—a nation built upon an experimental ideal that sought to supercede the societal diminuations of monarchy and nonrepresentational government—does not at this time possess such a figure as Bob Kennedy.

It is impossible for such an individual to rise up and inspire the masses, when those “masses” are placated by reality television, corporate-centric “news,” and political entities that are, bluntly put, for sale to the highest bidder and/or loudest scaremonger—and it will remain impossible for “the next Bob Kennedy” to rise up from the ashes, until the political-based indulgences, fomented by the current administration and its allies upon of this nation, are just that—ashes.

Take away the encroachments that today’s societal revisionists have wrapped around the people as a cozy quilt: The dumbed-down curriculums in the schools; the pathetic one-in-every-home X-Boxes; the televisions that project life-sized reality television into the brains of what should be a portion of the highest-level-thinking species on the planet—take it away for but a single months—and the spell of Neoconservative placation will crack.

America has, for some time now, honed its proficiency at exporting the fire of Democracy to foreign shores. If America is ever to see its next Phoenix—its next Bob Kennedy—it must first pass through just such a fire; a fire of its own making….

I think the closest we’ve gotten was Clinton and look what happened to him. Fortunately, those who hate and fear leaders who appeal to the “common folk” were content to engage in character assasination.

For now, no. I think there are several pols who’d like us to think they’re the next man of principle. John McCain springs to mind (excuse me while I laugh myself sick) but so far I’ve seen no one who is willing to take real, potentially career ending risks. Well, wRangel is a loud mouth and demands investigations for everything but I don’t know if he knows he’ll get re-elected no matter what or if he just doesn’t care.

I’d like to see this topic revisited mid-way through 2007. Considering what we have in the White House and who is in charge in Congress, I think we’re approaching a critical point in US history. Fifty years from now historians will either write about how So-and-so stood up to the President and prevented X from happening (thus saving America from fascism/another great depression, etc) or how the rest of the world had to band together to end the reign of America’s Mad King George II. (With pictures of the smouldering crater where the The Ranch used to be, followed by photos of Mounties liberating Nancy Pelosi from one of the Democrat Re-education Centers.)

Personal ambition and self-respect are not flaws, and saints are afflicted with serious pathologies.

The standards and cynicism adopted by the Media and people in general are a serious barrier to greatness.

The Republican Party has used resentment to systematically promote not only reactionary policies but some seriously mediocre and sometimes actually deranged personalities into political life. That’s the other side of the Democratic Party’s inability to replace the giants of the 1960’s. If we want giants, we have to help a reliable electoral majority reliably choose admiration of what is admirable over resentment.

We have to defeat the manufacture of resentment, and promote critical, but not cynical examination of character in our political leaders.

It is not just that the RFKs are not coming forward, but that the People are not embracing them, and, instead, the plutocracy is systematically foisting some seriously incompetent fools on us.

The U.S. has been led by George W. Bush, a man, who could scarcely display fewer attractive character traits, or be more unqualified to be President of the United States. The alternative in 2000 was rejected, in part, because he wore earth tones and “invented the internet”! In 2004, a genuine war hero was rejected because he hated the troops and was a coward!

The days of political heros has long passed with wall to wall negative media spin feeding the country’s appetite for scandal and ritual sacrifice of our celebrities.
Ask Harold Ford or John Kerry why we don’t have heroes.
Those in control room where popular images are forged want politicians to be flawed and with clipped wings.

I almost think this question is unfair. We were robbed of RFK’s potential, not his accomplishments. History has judged his unfulfilled potential positively. What he could have actually accomplished will never be known.
At some level, this question seems to ask if there is anyone around today who can fulfill RFK’s unfulfilled potential.
I would say it’s obvious that there is not. I would also say that it’s doubtful that Bobby could have completely fulfilled the potential that history has bestowed upon him.
History may decide one of our contemporary politicians to be possessed of greatness and vision. But, I doubt we’d agree on who that person is today.

Wow, Tom. That post gave me goose bumps, mostly because I too, remember RFK, not to mention SDS. Perhaps if factors didn’t intercede at a critical time in my life, I would have enlisted with the Weathermen, and gone and blown up buildings and such.

I straddle the feelings of despair and hopelessness (not personally, just politically — don’t want anyone to think I’m on anti-depressants or something) regularly. Things have spiraled downward so much that I find myself at a loss of reason for optimism.

I didn’t see any of it coming. Hell, I was just trying not to be classified a “yuppie,” “buppie,” or any “ippie” in the 80’s. When the 90’s hit, hell, I was just happy to have a man in the White House that could appear on Arsenio, wear shades and play the sax. I was tired of the old foggies that always controlled our government in Washington. And then … there came Bush, 9/11 and Iraq.

Because my religious beliefs stem from Iran, I am acutely aware of the difference between Arabs and Persians. And I was little more aware of the Middle East than many prior to 9/11. After that, America went downhill, being led by this unbelievable group of mean-spirted, bigoted and hateful Christian militia. When my best friend told me he hoped the US would “bomb the f..k out of Afghanistan and wipe all towelheads off the face of the earth,” I was floored. Not since the black/white racial tensions of the 1960’s had I seen or heard such viciousness come out of people’s mouths about the new enemy, Arabs (and wrapped up in their hated was anyone from the Middle East whether or not they were Christian, Jewish, Baha’i, artiest or Moslem — see Lebanon for examples).

When looking at the field of prospective leaders, including for president in 2008, there’s absolutely no one that even comes close to the presence of Bobby, or JFK for that matter. People keep pointing to Obama, but I find him to be just as mired in the bullshit of Washington, even though he’s a newbie, as the Republicans are. He has oratory skills, but his votes in Congress thus far do not inspire me.

About the only thing that has sparked some light for me has been the progressive/netroots movement. It’s like a conglomeration that includes all people of a like mind, and has encompassed not only moderate Republicans and liberal Democrats, but Independents and others of similar ilk. I have never registered for a party, and have at times voted Republican (think Los Angeles/California), but for the first time, I saw the emergence of what could truly be transformed into a viable third party. Now, before everyone goes psycho on me, just give it some thought. These congressmen/women who were elected with the help of the netroots, represent a different thinking about government. And, they were elected by people that spanned all types of parties, that spoke out with their vote, much like Howard Beale’s “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

If Al Gore can be convinced to run again, he’d get my vote. Hillary is a no show for me, she’s too slick and she lacks the charisma of her husband, which was handily used to “unite,” more than “divide.”

I agree, however, with the sentiment that the new leaders will have to come from successive generations below ours. That is where the anger is fostered, and channeled into change. This is where a Bobby can be found.

If an RFK-like figure emerges, I think it will be someone with a prosecutorial background, like Eliot Spitzer or Patrick Fitzgerald.

Just a few further thoughts. Tom, your comment was brilliant and evocative of that whole era. DeepDarkDiamond, you say there was no guarantee that he would have got the nomination, yet every Democract who had ever won both the NY and CA primaries did get the nomination. Grumpy, you say it was unlikely he could have won the presidency even if nominated (since we no longer had the “solid South”, thank god or LBJ), but there were so many unprecedented events that year, who can say for sure? He certainly had momentum, and I think if anyone could have “converted” working class bigots it would’ve been Bobby. Several of you rightly point out that it was McCarthy who told us the emperor had no clothes when it was unpopular to do so, and I emphatically agree, but whether he could have taken the fight all the way, down and dirty, who can say? My money was, enthusiastically, on Bobby once McCarthy had cleared the way. Grumpy, “why so many tears for Bobby and relatively few for Martin?” Assuming you’re referring to the current disucssion and not wider American failure on anything racial, it’s because this is a political discussion and Martin was as a-political as it was possible to me … he had another mission. Nevertheless, when one asks whom Martin (and Cesar) were brothers with, whom they turned to who pointed to them, clearly the answer is Bobby.

I almost never read David Brooks, but there was no Frank Rich this morning and I needed to read something. It’s quite a moving essay. In it he says

But during March 1964, he visited Bunny Mellon’s estate in Antigua, and spent the vacation in his room, reading a book Jackie Kennedy had given him, “The Greek Way,” by Edith Hamilton.

“The Greek Way” contains essays on the great figures of Athenian history and literature, and Kennedy found a worldview that helped him explain and recover from the tragedy that had befallen him.

He goes on

Classical scholars often scorn Hamilton because she wrote in a breathless “all the glory that was Greece” mode, but her book changed Robert Kennedy’s life. He carried his beaten, underlined and annotated copy around with him for years, pulling it from his pocket, reading sections aloud to audiences in what Thomas calls “a flat, unrhythmic voice with a mournful edge.”

Kennedy found in the Greeks a sensibility similar to his own — heroic and battle-scarred but also mystical. He shared the awful sense of foreboding that pervades the work of Aeschylus and Sophocles, and that distinctly Greek awareness of the invisible patterns that connect events to one another, how the arrogance men and women show at one moment will twist back and bring agony later on.

And further

Kennedy, recovering from his brother’s murder, found in the ancient Greeks a civilization that was eager to look death in the face, but which seemed to draw strength from what it found there. The Greeks seemed more convinced of the dignity and significance of life the more they brooded on the pain and precariousness of it.

Kennedy underlined a passage of Hamilton’s book in which she summarizes the rippled nature of Greek optimism: “Life for him was an adventure, perilous indeed, but men are not made for safe havens. The fullness of life is in the hazards of life. And, at the worst, there is that in us which can turn defeat into victory.” If they were doctors of the spirit, the Greeks’ specialty was to take grief and turn it into resolution.

I think Brooks summarizes much of what I felt, and still feel, for Bobby Kennedy. I wish all (at least more) of America were capable of appreciating that, but it’s hard to compete with almost non-stop “reality” and “american idol” TeeVee and what passes for news, commentary and debate since his assassination left us rudder-less while the P.T. Barnums of the G.O.P. gives us all of bread and circuses we can stomach.

Wesley Clark is such a man.

Ever since 2004, he has been on the road tirelessly promoting congressional candidates, only raising enough money to keep him on the road while emailing his supporters to donate directly to the candidates themselves.

Clark was one of the very few to come out and actively support Lamont for 2006. He is also the only (potential) candidate so far, I believe, to indicate that we need to be moving toward national healthcare.

Clark is not only a man of principles, he is also probably the single American — out of all Americans, not all American politicians — whose resume shows he is best qualified to handle our current difficult foreign policy situation. He has received more medals from the heads of state in Europe — after his amazing leadership of NATO in Kosovo — than anyone since Eisenhower.

Clark is also a man with a dream for the United States — not just a man with a dream to become president.

In 2003, Clark posted his 100 Year Vision for the United States on his website, securingamerica.com. Here is the text:

100 Year Vision
By Wes Clark

Looking ahead 100 years, the United States will be defined by our environment, both our physical environment and our legal, Constitutional environment. America needs to remain the most desirable country in the world, attracting talent and investment with the best physical and institutional environment in the world. But achieving our goals in these areas means we need to begin now. Environmentally, it means that we must do more to protect our natural resources, enabling us to extend their economic value indefinitely through wise natural resource extraction policies that protect the beauty and diversity of our American ecosystems — our seacoasts, mountains, wetlands, rain forests, alpine meadows, original timberlands and open prairies. We must balance carefully the short-term needs for commercial exploitation with longer-term respect for the natural gifts our country has received. We may also have to assist market-driven adjustments in urban and rural populations, as we did in the 19th Century with the Homestead Act.

Institutionally, our Constitution remains the wellspring of American freedom and prosperity. We must retain a pluralistic democracy, with institutional checks and balances that reflect the will of the majority while safeguarding the rights of the minority. We must seek to maximize the opportunities for private gain, consistent with concern for the public good. And we must institute a culture of transparency and accountability, in which we set the world standard for good government. As new areas of concern arise — in the areas of intellectual property, bioethics, and other civil areas — we will assure continued access to the courts, as well as to the other branches of government, and a vibrant competitive media that informs our people and enables their effective participation in civic life. And even more importantly, we will assure in meeting the near term challenges of the day — whether they be terrorism or something else — that, we don’t compromise the freedoms and rights which are the very essence of the America we are protecting.

If we are to remain competitive we will have to do more to develop our “human potential.” To put it in a more familiar way, we should help every American to “be all he or she can be.” For some this means only providing a framework of opportunities — for others it means more direct assistance in areas such as education, health care, and retirement security. And these are thirty year challenges — educating young people from preschool until they are at their most productive, helping adults transition from job to job and profession to profession during their adult lives; promoting physical vigor and good health through public health measures, improved diagnostics, preventive health, and continuing health care to extend longevity and productivity to our natural limits; and strengthening retirement security, simply because it is right; first for our society to assure that all its members who have contributed throughout their lifetimes are assured a minimal standard of living, and secondly to free the American worker and family to concentrate on the challenges of today. Such long-term challenges must be addressed right away, with a new urgency.

We have a solid foundation for meeting these challenges in many of the principles and programs already present today. They need not be enumerated here, except to argue for giving them the necessary priorities and resources. We can never ensure that every one has the same education, or health care, or retirement security, nor would we want to do so. But all Americans are better off when we ensure that each American will have fundamental educational skills and access to further educational development throughout their lives; that each American will have access to the diagnostic, preventive and acute health care and medicines needed for productive life, as well as some basic level of financial security in his or her retirement.

To do this we will have to get the resources and responsibilities right. In the first place, this means allocating responsibilities properly between public and private entities. Neither government nor “the market” is a universal tool — each must be used appropriately, whether the issues are in security, education, health or retirement. Then we must reexamine private versus public revenues and expenditures. We need to return to the aims of the 1990’s when we sought to balance our federal budget and reduce the long-term public debt. Finally, it means properly allocating public responsibilities to regulate, outsource, or operate. This means retaining government regulation where necessary to meet public needs, and balancing the federal government’s strengths of standardization and progressive financing with greater insights into the particular needs and challenges that State and local authorities bring.

As we work on education, health care, and retirement security we must also improve the business climate in the United States. This is not simply a matter of reducing interest rates and stimulating demand. Every year, this economy must create more than a million new jobs, just to maintain the same levels of employment, and to reduce unemployment to the levels achieved in the Clinton Administration, we must do much more immediately. This is in part a matter of smoothing the business cycle, with traditional monetary and fiscal tools, but as we improve communications and empower more international trade and finance, firms will naturally shift production and services to areas where the costs are lower. In the near term we should aim to create in America the best business environment in the world — using a variety of positive incentives to keep American jobs and businesses here, attract business from abroad, and to encourage the creation of new jobs, principally through the efforts of small business. These are not new concerns, but they must be addressed and resourced with a new urgency in facing the increasing challenges of technology and free trade. And labor must assist, promoting the attitudes, skills, education and labor mobility to enable long overdue hikes in the minimum wage in this country.

I appreciate the posts here by Tom and other veterans of that period, mostly because I found Sirota’s post disgusting in its ahistorical ignorance (and responded on Daily Kos here, for anyone interested; I also just find him kind of disgusting). I think most holier-than-thou lefties of today, Sirota very prominently among them, would have assailed Bobby as a ruthless opportunist (not without some justification, I might add). The problem with living in real time is that you inevitably miss the forest for the trees–as the focus on Bobby’s opportunism, justifiable though it was, suggests from the perspective of today.

I was born five years after RFK was killed, but he’s always held a special place in my political imagination because he seemed to fuse two public-figure archetypes that are more often mutually exclusive: the inspirational hero who leads with vision and empathy and puts himself at the head of an outsider movement; and the political operator who understands the mechanics of power and has a working knowledge of how to use it. That he seemed to grow and change so much in the last years of his life adds an element of pathos to it all; that things so fundamentally went to hell after his assassination gives one the sense that much more died in June 1968 than one man.

But if you believe in a heroic progressive lineage, and/or have faith that our country can still produce individuals who unexpectedly rise to the challenges of their times, it’s clear that the same type never appears twice. Lincoln and FDR couldn’t have been more different, in background or temperament; anyone looking for “the next Lincoln” wouldn’t have been poking around Hyde Park. Similarly, we’ll never find “the next RFK”–but that isn’t to say that we won’t again see great leaders who both understand where the country is and have a vision of where they want to take us that aligns with America’s finest principles.

I remember thinking even then of 1968 as the “year of the great national nervous breakdown” – Tet Offensive, New Hampshire Primary, King Assassination, LBJ resignation, RFK assassination, Chicago riots, fall election of Nixon…

I really think we’d be a vastly different country had any of those things (other than Tet) gone the other way. We’d even be vastly different if a whole lot of us who didn’t vote that year had voted for Humphrey. No Nixon, no Watergate, no chance for the current batch of Thugs to get their starts…

Well no one has to feel guilty about casting a vote, since one person’s vote is never statistically significant in an election. The numbers are so large that voting is a symbolic action. It’ a good symbolic action but that’s what it is.

btw

Great men (and women) are made, not born.

Unfortunately, they are made by trying times, where their character is revealed.

You had to get clean for Gene. Hippies in neckties bicycling around on a mission like Mormon Missionaries.

I wonder when the Tiger Woods Model will be used to produce a candidate. Start training them at age 3 for the presidency.

yet every Democract who had ever won both the NY and CA primaries did get the nomination.

I’m not sure what your point is, Ed – NY did not hold a Democratic party Presidential primary in 1968 – only 15 states (including DC) did that year and NY wasn’t one of them. And that’s basically my point – only a minority of the convention delegates were chosen in primaries – the vast majority were chosen either in caucus or appointed by the state committees – which overwhemingly were already pledged to Johnson and then to Humprhey. And as for primaries – McCarthy won more states (6) than Kennedy (4). It was by no means a slam dunk for Kennedy. His best chance probably would have been a brokered convention.