Barack Obama’s leadership style suits these turbulent times

By Ed Griffin-Nolan The swollen, grateful, jubilant eyes of Jesse Jackson watching Barack Obama take the stage on Election Night was the picture that kept filling my mind as the days wore on. Many of the younger generation may not fully appreciate the foundation Jackson laid for the Obama triumph, but in those eyes that have seen so much blood and could now cry tears of joy, we could see the arc of history. The agony of the Hotel Lorraine balcony in Memphis, Tenn., in 1968. Jackson’s “Keep Hope Alive” run for the presidency in 1988. The post-millennial crowds filling Grant Park in Chicago last Tuesday night, Nov. 4.

See Election Day slide show

 

The media’s torture of the English language

and other dictionary mishaps

By Ed Griffin-Nolan

In the aftermath of the election of 2008, it is time to give the poor, tattered English language some desperately needed rest. The media and the nation as a whole have been gathered around this electoral marathon for so long that the participants and observers alike need, as they say at the scene of an accident, a little air.

A new book examines the steady erosion of wages

for average Americans

By Ed Griffin-Nolan

These are strange times. The other night I heard a television panel discussing—not joking about but actually discussing—which endorsement voters should put more stock in: Colin Powell or Joe the Plumber. This wasn’t Comedy Central, it was CNN.

Powell, who has served as Army Chief of Staff, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, National Security adviser and secretary of state (not to mention that he was many people’s favorite for the Republican nomination for president in 1996), has given us a few reasons to listen when he speaks.

Electing Howie Hawkins to represent us in Congress—now that’s change

By Ed Griffin-Nolan

If you’ve never understood what political commentators mean when they use the term “bean counter,” you should meet Dan Maffei. And may I add that given the failure of Congress to provide oversight of our financial system, and the fact that we will be paying for that failure for a decade or more, having someone willing to count beans, 700 billion beans, doesn’t sound like such a bad idea at all.

Maffei has the endorsement of pretty much every group that usually endorses Democrats—unions, environmentalists, social advocates—and a few more. He is the poster child for the Democratic Party’s hopes for what they can do in post-Bush America.

As the presidential campaign takes the low road,

it’s important to look beyond the headlines

By Ed Griffin-Nolan

It is a fair statement to say that the Syracuse Orange and the Nittany Lions of Penn State each had 11 players on the Carrier Dome field a month ago, but that doesn’t really tell you the story of the game. The final score, 55-13 in favor of Coach Joe Paterno’s squad, doesn’t really reveal how bad it was. Even Greg Robinson’s golden prose couldn’t make this lopsided equation add up. 

Equivalence is easy to measure in sports, but when it comes to politics, it takes a bit of work. You have to get beyond the numbers a bit to give a fair picture of what happened. But in political reporting, the need to present both sides of a campaign can lead to equations as false as if a sportswriter were trying to tell us the Orange were having a season on a par with Penn State. It just ain’t so.

With four weeks before Election Day,

Democrats need to stop griping

By Ed Griffin-Nolan

The most annoying sound in this presidential campaign isn’t the whine coming from Sarah Palin’s mouth. It is the fretful whining emitted by frightened liberals whenever they notice that their candidate might possibly be losing. 

I’ve grown tired of listening to so many people who want Sen. Barack Obama to win so badly that they will do almost anything—anything except work on his behalf—to make victory a possibility. When the Republican ticket got a bounce coming out of their convention and the introduction of Sarah Palin, the hand-wringing became so excessive that it became unsafe for many liberals to drive.

Give ex-attorney general Eliot Spitzer a shot at redemption by cleaning up Wall Street—before America files Chapter 11

By Ed Griffin-Nolan

John McCain suggested the other day that he might appoint New York state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to clean up the mess in the nation’s financial markets. While this would be one of his better appointments to date (he’s only made one real personnel choice, and we know where that went), it still missed the mark.

The guy you really want is Eliot Spitzer. Not Eliot the governor, but Eliot the attorney general, the guy everyone feared and revered as the Sheriff of Wall Street. Spitzer made his career by policing the securities industry. He knew better than to worship brokers and traders; he told us to watch them like hawks. We now know why he was able to be so coldblooded and clear-eyed in his approach to Wall Street: He’d obviously dealt with pimps long enough to know the game.

It was hard to relate to the recent hurricane’s Southern

discomfort—until its remnants visited Central New York

By Ed Griffin-Nolan

Did you ever find yourself rooting for the hurricane? It’s OK; you don’t have to tell me. Sometimes when you watch those big circles swirling across the television screen, the announcers are getting all excited, and the correspondents are standing in the whipping winds getting soaked and their hats are blowing off (what did they expect?), you may just find some part of yourself feeling badly for Ike as he gets downgraded to a Category 3. As you make your way to bed you may (or you may not) secretly hold out hope that he will find that warm air mass out there over the gulf and somehow regroup as he heads toward shore.

John McCain’s odd choice proves the scary power of the Republican religious right By Ed Griffin-Nolan

Sarah Palin is a history-making choice. And here is the history I hope she will make: Years from now her selection by a failed presidential candidate named John McCain will be known as the moment that sounded the death knell of the Republican Party’s pandering to the religious right. Decades down the road people will attribute McCain’s defeat to his deference to the theocrats who have stolen the party of Lincoln and pushed the country in a ruinous direction for nearly a generation. 

If the maverick title were ever applicable to McCain, it can now be retired. McCain, by all reports, wanted to run with his ideological soulmate Joe Lieberman, but the party would not accept someone whose version of family did not match that prescribed by their religion. He turned, at the 11th hour, to the fresh-faced Alaska governor.

We know much about John McCain, including his dogged pursuit of lost causes By Ed Griffin-Nolan

Come next January, we will have a president who was born outside the continental United States. A man who knows the tropics will command the Army of the North. Either the Hawaiian-born Barack Obama or the Panama Canal Zone’s John McCain will hold the nuclear football and the authority to lead our millions of soldiers and sailors, Marines and airmen into battle. 

He will inherit command of more than 130,000 ground troops in Iraq and a contingent of nearly 30,000 spread throughout Afghanistan. Conventional wisdom says that McCain is the more experienced candidate in international and military affairs, due to his military background and years in the Senate. That is true. It is also true that George W. Bush has more experience with Category 5 hurricanes than any other president of the United States, but such experience is of little comfort to the people of New Orleans.