Tom Baxter

Commenting on the Republican primary loss earlier this month of his friend, Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, former Sen. Sam Nunn bemoaned the lack of political passion which he says is eroding the middle ground of American politics.

“The people who I call the common-sense middle are largely absent in the active role of the political – whether it’s fundraising or get-out-the-vote — and that’s a big part of the problem,” the former senator from Georgia, who worked across the aisle with Lugar to create a program for the elimination of nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union, told the AJC. “People on the extremes have every right to exercise their voice and pocketbook, but the people in the middle should as well.”

This failure of the middle to rise up can’t be blamed on a lack of money or media attention, as attested last week by the collapse of Americans Elect, the latest in a series of well-funded, high-profile attempts to gin up interest in a third-party, middle-ground presidential candidate.
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A few years ago, Emory’s Michael C. Carlos Museum hosted a fascinating exhibit based on the papyrus legal records of a family which lived in Egypt in the 5th Century BC.

As a testament to the lasting lessons such archaeological treasures can transmit, it came to mind last week when Barack Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to endorse same-sex marriage.
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At about the same time the U.S. Supreme Court was hearing arguments in the Justice Department’s challenge to the Arizona immigration law last month, there were a couple of developments which paint a much different vision of the future than might be guessed by Americans on either side of the immigration issue.

A few days before the much-publicized hearing, Audi announced it has selected Mexico as the site for its new SUV manufacturing plant, spurning several U.S. suitors, including Georgia, Tennessee and Alabama. This follows recent decisions by Honda, Mazda and Nissan to build or expand on plants in Mexico, which is projected to increase its auto manufacturing by over 40% by 2015.

This news adds context to the second development, a report by the Pew Hispanic Center that net migration from Mexico to the United States, legal and illegal, has slowed to a halt and may even be moving slightly in the other direction.
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The most protracted presidential campaign departure I can recall before the present example was Wesley Clark’s in 2004, and that was only because the general got cold feet halfway down an elevator in Memphis heading toward his withdrawal speech after the Tennessee Democratic Primary. As a result he made the press corps take an extra bus ride to Little Rock the next day before he faced the inevitable.

That was nothing compared to Newt, of course. In what he may well consider to be a template for how future unsuccessful candidates should structure their goodbyes, Gingrich let it be known a week in advance that he’d be officially leaving the campaign on Tuesday, and then – you’ve got to love this guy – postponed the announcement until Wednesday.
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It serves the purposes of both sides to portray the recent departure from the American Legislative Exchange Council of several of its corporate sponsors as a “War on ALEC,” in which left-wing groups pressured Coca-Cola and other corporations into defecting from the organization. A war, for both the left and the right, makes for great fundraising.

In a sense this story line is accurate. The campaign led by the African American group Color of Change was the catalyst for the corporation’s break with ALEC over its promotion of “stand your ground” gun laws like the one involved in the Trayvon Martin case. Much the same can be said about the Media Matters for America drive against Rush Limbaugh in the wake of his comments about Sandra Fluke earlier this year. If you want to elevate these interest-group scrimmages up to the status of full-scale armed conflict, fine, we can call it a “war.”

But the alacrity with which so many companies followed Coca-Cola’s lead, like the rush away from Rush, makes it seem as if they were just waiting for the chance to close the checkbook on ALEC. Which makes sense, when you consider how much the contemporary corporate mindset is geared to the ruthless elimination of the extraneous.
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“Filing feels good! Share your tax triumph with your friends!”

That’s the cheery message, along with that familar FB button, which greets you on TurboTax this year when you’re finished with the annual ordeal. I’ve embraced social media, but posting my “tax triumph” on Facebook is pushing it just a little too far. It’s vaguely un-American to post the news of your tax filing as if you’d just bought a new puppy.

Shame, too, because for once, I have something to share. Quite unexpectedly, our household has been the beneficiary of Sonny’s Gift.
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Officially, what has come to be called the Great Recession ended nearly three years ago, although Friday’s paltry jobs report was yet another demonstration of how hard it’s been for the nation to put it in the past tense. Still, there has been time now since the economy hit a bottom and began this all-too-modest recovery to begin thinking about what the Great Recession really was, and what lessons from it we’ll pass on to future generations.

When parents tell their children and grandchildren about it decades from now, they will first have to struggle with the Orwellian nature of the name. English provides a perfectly good word for a really big recession – depression – but for telling reasons, we’ve shirked from this usage.
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Late in the last night of this year’s legislative session, in that hour when so much mischief famously has been done, there was a brief but illuminating flash of red which revealed the way things work under the Golden Dome and the potential of social media to disrupt the old order.

You can it watch it, starting at the 3 hour 16 minute mark, on this Georgia Public Broadcasting archive video.
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The insensate calendar says we’re at the end of March, but without the basketball you wouldn’t know it. It could be well into May by the way it feels outside, and the political calendar has become just as confusing as the weather.

The presidential election has spun out into very different timelines, Red and Blue. A lot of Republicans still want it to be February, while the Democrats should be hoping this was July.
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Seriously? Seriously?

That little mirror phrase has spread recently through comedy shows and social media, to a point where it has become nearly as hackneyed as the dreadful “at the end of the day.” But you can’t help but think that when a lot of people picked up their Sunday paper and read about the plan to launch yet another attempt at a major tax overhaul late in this election-year legislative session, their response had to be, “Seriously? Seriously?”
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