Lucky (The Book)

 

Four years ago, Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes gave us Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign. That title played on the Clinton campaign's mission to shatter what she herself labelled "the highest, hardest glass ceiling," but which instead ended up leaving that ceiling solidly in place, shattering instead both Clinton's and the Democratic party's hopes and expectations for 2016 (meanwhile saddling the country with the disaster that was the Trump presidency). The book recounted how everything that could go wrong did go wrong - a set of trials and tribulations virtually unlike any other in American campaign history: a partisan congressional investigation; a primary opponent who attacked her character; a rogue FBI director; the rank misogyny of her Republican rival; a media that scrutinized her every move while failing even to get that Republican rival to turn over his tax returns; and even a Kremlin-based campaign to defeat her." That book becomes a kind of autopsy of what is rightly called a "doomed campaign," in which according to one staffer, "We're not allowed to have nice things."

Four years later, Allen and Barnes have given us Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely won the Presidency, in which the authors show how, whereas four years before everything went wrong for Hilary Clinton, in this alignment of political time and space everything Joe Biden needed to right for him went his way. "It is the story of a candidate whose life, politics, and message best met the moment, as judged by the collective wisdom of the 155 million-plus Americans who cast ballots." Whereas Hilary "had used her platform to try to define Trump, but everyone already knew Trump’s flaws, Biden thought. If you’re going to take on Trump, he told confidants, people want to know what you’re for."

Despite the obvious roadblocks to his party's nomination, including his age and the party establishment's antipathy to his candidacy, time, "Biden put a lot of faith in his own charm as a tool for bridging personal differences and substantive divides." Biden, we learn was always quite confident that he could beat Trump and win the general election, but recognized that his problem would be winning the nomination. As for theObama, et al., establishment, "Biden most resembled the establishment, and the establishment had reacted to him by turning up its nose. It was painful, and embarrassing, that even when he led in the polls, Democratic insiders did not seem to believe in him." And, then, there was his age: "a courtship-era candidate operating in a Tinder world" (something which, again turned out to be less of a disadvantage than might otherwise have been the case).

But Biden was lucky. So, for example, when he came in a poor 4th place in Iowa, the story was instead about how poorly the party primary was conducted. Then, of course, he got Congressman Jim Clyburn's endorsement, which probably guaranteed him a win inSouth Carolina and set off a massive move on the part of the party establishment to coalesce behind Biden as the only way to avoid the disaster to the party of a Sanders nomination. Then, of course, came the pandemic, which saved him from the risks of tripping over his words while running a traditional campaign while pitting him against Trump's catastrophically incompetent performance against the pandemic. For all the pre-campaign anxieties about whether he could or would run a viable campaign, the pandemic freed him from the need to campaign in a traditional way, while highlighting the contract between him and his opponent, who kept making himself look bad without any effort on Biden's part. And Biden "believed that his life, his values, and his conduct as a public servant reflected what his party preached—but didn’t always practice—and provided a black-and-white contrast with the silver-spoon president."

Biden as also, of course, especially lucky in locking up African-American support, the support of a constituency desperately desirous of defeating Trump and willing to vote strategically to accomplish that.. "Biden had already established a broader coalition among Black voters and conservative Democratic whites. Some voters of color were attracted to him because of the affinity conservative white Democrats had for him, not despite it. The chance that white voters in swing states would pick Biden over Trump—backed up by polls showing Biden defeating Trump head-to-head—appealed to many Black Democrats who were more concerned with a Democrat winning the presidency than which Democrat did it."

As for the General Election campaign, Biden was agin lucky in which he had for an opponent. "Like so much of the campaign," the authors note about the first debate between Biden and Trump at the end of September, this was not the way Biden had envisioned his bid for the presidency. And yet, once again, an unpredictable moment—an unbelievable moment—favored him."

As with the 2016 book, three authors' coverage of the election itself is riveting. And, once again, despite a clear win in the popular vote, the electoral college would be the scary challenge. Unlike Clinton in 2016, however, in the electoral college in 2020 Biden got lucky: "what was striking was how close Trump had come to pulling off another upset. In 2016, Clinton had lost the three pivotal Rust Belt states by a total of 77,736 votes. Trump lost the three states that would have given him a victory—Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona—by a total of 42,918 votes. In Wisconsin, Biden wound up with a 20,682-vote margin, topping Trump by less than two-thirds of a percentage point. In Georgia, the number would be 11,779 votes, or less than a quarter of a percentage point. And in Arizona, where Fox had doubled down on its call for Biden despite pressure from the Trump camp, it would be 10,457 votes, or less than a third of a percentage point. To get Trump to a clear victory of 270 electoral votes—adding roughly 23,000 votes to flip Nebraska’s Second Congressional District—it would still have taken fewer votes for him to win than his margin in 2016. Publicly, Biden’s team struck the posture that he had won a big victory. Privately, campaign officials acknowledged they had hung on by their fingernails."

In the authors' words, "between Trump’s pernicious efforts to invalidate the results by lying, intimidating state election officials, and inciting his followers to storm the Capitol, and Biden’s incentive to portray the outcome as a landslide, many voters didn’t realize how close the president had come to winning a second term."

In short, both Biden and the country got lucky. "In 2016, Trump had needed everything to go wrong for Hillary Clinton to win. This time, Biden caught every imaginable break."

Of course, being lucky. being the right candidate for the right moment, does not diminish the effectiveness what he himself brought to his campaign. "The key to Biden’s victory, more than anything else, was the consistency of his message about what he would do for voters—restore 'the soul of this nation'—and why he was uniquely capable of delivering on that promise. Ridiculed for so long about his lack of discipline as a candidate, Biden stuck to his theory of the case during a brutal primary slog and in the face of pressure from his allies—even members of his own staff—to change his strategy and tactics in the general election. ... Knowing who he was, and where he wanted to be politically, allowed Biden’s campaign to capitalize when luck ran his way—and it did, time and again." 

The Interview

The Netflix series The Crown necessarily fictionalizes its interpretation of historical events in 20th-century British history in situations such as the private conversations of the Queen, her Prime Ministers, and members of the Royal Family, the actual content of which we will never know. That said, it does a good job of capturing that distinctly modern dilemma of royal life - the conflict between a traditional understanding of commitment to duty to Crown, country, and Commonwealth and a contemporary obsession with freedom, autonomy, and personal happiness. In the 20th century, the locus classicus for this conflict was, of course the 1936 abdication of King Edward VIII, who notoriously abandoned the traditional expectation of his royal role as one of public commitment to duty and instead prioritized his desire for freedom, autonomy, and personal happiness in his shocking insistence on marrying an American divorcee contrary the advice of his Government and the other governments of the Commonwealth. 

History, Karl Marx famously reminded us in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, repeats itself "the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." The second iteration of the Edward and Wallis tragedy is the contemporary Harry and Meghan soap opera, the focus of the couple's much anticipated TV interview with Oprah Winfrey last night. (Given that Harry has five people between him and the throne - his father, his brother, and his nephews and niece - his abandonment of his royal role lacks the constitutional consequences of Edward's abdication and serves, soap-opera style, mainly to entertain an easily distracted popular audience, especially on this side of the Atlantic.)

Duchess Meghan presented herself to Oprah as someone previously unfamiliar with and surprisingly naive about what it means to be a working member of the British royal family, someone who experienced a misalliance of perception and reality. In contrast, she describes her current situation as living "authentically." 

In fairness to Meghan, there is certainly something seriously problematic about contemporary tabloid and social media culture - a crazy culture which elevates royal princesses and princess only then to drag them down. (Non-royal public persons increasingly experience this as well.) 

Obviously, "outsiders" - even members of aristocratic families with longstanding connections with the Crown (like the late Princess of Wales) - have experienced enormous difficulty in navigating the complex and contradictory expectations contemporary tabloid and media culture have created. Even the Duke of Edinburgh, a royal prince, whose mother had been born at Windsor Castle, and who married into the family at a much more deferential time in history, was treated as an outsider and experienced difficulty dealing with the many complex and contradictory expectations. That Meghan would also have experienced such stresses seems to have been almost inevitable (and should accordingly have been expected and prepared for). Admittedly that is an aspect of the modern era, to which there seems no obvious answer. (The older alternative of arranged marriages between lifelong royals who already know the drill is at present, for all sorts of reasons, no longer feasible, nor is a return to an if not deferential at least more civil media environment at all likely.)

That said, certainly it needs to be stipulated, however, that royal life, while obviously very glamorous and privileged, is, by its nature, intended to be a vocation - one of lifelong commitment to Crown, country, and (in the British case) Commonwealth. And Meghan's complaints are not just about the media but also about the "institution" (as she likes to call it) itself. Clearly, Meghan found real royal life quite constricting. Revealingly, she unfavorably compares it in the interview with her previous - obviously freer - life as an American celebrity. But, of course, the whole problem lies in the total difference between being a royal person and being an American celebrity. If, perhaps, she really was unaware of that difference and was as unfamiliar with royal life as she suggests, someone should certainly have enlightened her sooner rather than later.

And there is, unfortunately, also at least an apparent perception on Meghan and Harry's part that racial prejudice has played a part in the difficulties the couple have experienced.

Both Harry and Meghan acknowledge that she was welcomed into the family at first and that things went well for a while, before things started to go wrong. The menacing cloud covering all this seems to be the memory of Harry's mother, Diana - someone who was very differently experienced by different members of the family, the media, and society, and who is still very differentially interpreted. Likewise, if Harry feels "let down" by his father, one suspects his father feels let down by his son as well.

There are some problems that have no perfect solutions. There is obviously a legitimate need for royal persons (like other public personalities) to find some sort of livable balance between a life lived on a public stage and some sort of normal human existence. Somehow all royals and royal couples have to figure out how best to do that. How adequately they do so will depend in part on their individual personalities and on the sorts of resources that are available to them. So far, it does not seem that the solution that is being tried by this couple is the optimal one.

The contemporary popular culture and media environment will always prioritize freedom, autonomy, and personal happiness at the expense of the more traditional expectations of lifelong commitment to duty. Yet the nature of monarchy and its contemporary purpose both for constitutional governance and a society's symbolic structure of values require all involved to prioritize the traditional expectations of lifelong commitment. In the end there is no getting around that.

The Way through the Desert

Some Thoughts on this 3rd Sunday of Lent, March 7, 2021.

Today’s Gospel [John 2:13-25] account of an angry Jesus at war with the Temple’s money-changers is a familiar one. It appears in some form in all 4 Gospels and its imagery has had influence far beyond its originally religious significance. Some 88 years ago, on March 4, 1933, in the depths of the 20th-century's Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugurated President of the United States.  Everybody has heard his famous line about the only thing we have to fear.  That same inaugural address also included the following words:

“Yes, the money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of that restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.”

Given the history of the past forty years, it seems FDR may have spoken too soon, may have spoken too confidently about a future from which the money changers still seem never to get completely evicted. But, from FDR until about forty years ago there was some ground for real hope on that score. And, when FDR said those words, in an era so much more religiously literate than our own, he could at least be confident that almost everyone would recognize his reference to the story told in today’s Gospel.

The “cleansing of the Temple,” as it is often called, was obviously a provocative act on Jesus’ part. It has been suggested that, together with Jesus’ Messiah-style entry into Jerusalem, it may have been the provocation precipitating his arrest and execution. Apparently, Jesus thought the Temple was something not just worth fighting over, but worth dying for, which would certainly add significance to our retelling it during Lent.

The original Jerusalem Temple, built by King Solomon and completed around 960 BC, had been destroyed by the Babylonians in 586. A reconstructed second Temple was completed in 515 BC and lasted until its destruction by the Romans in 70 AD, after which Judaism has had to adapt and make do without any Temple. But, back in Jesus' time, around 20 BC, King Herod the Great had begun a grandiose renovation of the Temple Mount, making the Jerusalem Temple one of the most impressive shrines in the ancient world. Herod was a great builder. He built palaces and pagan temples for his Gentile subjects, but his grandest project was the renovation of the Jewish Temple. It was the ultimate “stimulus package,” one of the largest construction projects of its time.

In the process, however, along beauty and grandeur, some of the classical, pagan model of a temple as a cultural, commercial, and social center also seemed to creep in from the surrounding secular culture. Jesus’ strong reaction to the various activities taking place in the Temple precincts may have reflected his identification with more traditional Jewish notions, which got him into trouble with the Temple’s priests (known at that time for their more accommodating approach to secular society).

So, in effect, what Jesus was fighting for in the Temple was Israel’s core national value – faithfulness to God alone, God who had made Israel a nation and given it his Law, transforming a semi-nomadic mob of ex-slaves into an actual nation. The exodus generation, Israel's founding generation, so to speak, had wandered about in the desert, desperately in need of direction, with only the vaguest idea of where they were headed. Along the way, however, God gave them the road-map they required to become a serious society, a functioning nation – the roadmap which Jewish tradition refers to as God’s “10 Words” and which we commonly call his “10 commandments.”

Fond as we are of biblical imagery and analogies, we Americans have long talked that way also about our Constitution, our founding-era roadmap out of our post-revolutionary chaos, likewise charting a path to becoming a serious society, a functioning nation. Like all analogies, it has its limits, but it's only a problem when we make the monumental mistake of blurring the difference between God's covenant with Israel and America's covenant with itself, mistaking (as some have done) our very human Constitution for some sort of divine revelation.

The Old Testament Torah, which we traditionally translate as “the Law,” was the concrete expression of God’s gift of himself to his people. The 10 Commandments [Exodus 20:1-17] constitute the core of that Law. The key to understanding the 10 Commandments is contained in how God identifies himself in the very 1st commandment: I, the Lord, am your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, that place of slavery. You shall have no other gods besides me. The Lord, who has shown himself to be God by liberating his people from slavery, is himself the rationale for this (and every subsequent) commandment.

The 10 commandments spell out in daily life the consequences of becoming God’s people. Living morally is our response to God’s covenant with us, our cooperation with the plan God has been pursuing through all of human history – from creation to Christ, from Christmas to the end.  In our fidelity to the commandments in moral lives, we reflect our gratitude to God and our commitment to remain faithful for the long haul.

According to an ancient legend, at Mount Sinai God made the wombs of all of Israel’s women as clear as glass – so that all future generations could see for themselves what was happening and personally commit to the covenant. I suppose that’s poor biology, but it’s a great image! It makes the all-important point that the commandments are addressed to each of us individually, which is why they are phrased in the singular. (Those of us above a certain age will remember having learned them in the old singular form – “thou shalt … thou shalt not.”). We are all each responsible to respond to God with what we do and the way we live.

As our road-map through the desert of daily life, the 10 Commandments call us over and over to commitment and fidelity:

- commitment and fidelity, first of all, to God himself, who has revealed himself to us, in his world, and in his word, and above us in Jesus his Son;

- commitment and fidelity to God’s world, which God has entrusted to us and which we have, both individually and collectively, managed to make such a mess of and done so much damage to;

- commitment and fidelity to one another, our fellow-wanderers in God’s world, whom we have been commanded both to care about and to care for, whether we like it or not and whether we like each other or not, both when war or economic hardships or a world-wide pandemic make us more conscious of our shared danger and our common need, and in times of peace and prosperity, when wealth, health, and safety tempt us to go it alone and leave others behind;

- and commitment and fidelity, finally, to God’s struggling but holy Church, by being part of which we are being empowered to live as God’s people in this world.

None of this comes automatically, and fidelity doesn’t come easily or cheaply – not for the folks at Mount Sinai (as so many subsequent episodes in Exodus illustrate) and not for anyone else either. But the commandments teach us that the fast food of individual fulfillment and personal autonomy just can’t compare with dining with one another together in God’s kingdom. 

For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength [1 Corinthians 1:22-25].  Jesus saw that – despite the blinding glare of the grandeur and riches of Herod’s Temple.  And so too, this Lent, Jesus challenges us to see the same with him.

One Year

Homily at Mass on the 1st Anniversary of My Mother's Death, Paulist Fathers' Motherhouse Chapel, March 5, 2021. A video recording of the Mass will be posted later today on Facebook.

Abraham Lincoln famously said: “in the end, it is not the years in a life, but the life in the years.” My mother was blessed with both. She outlived her siblings and in-laws, surpassing the psalmist’s famous fourscore and ten. We are so used to people getting old now that we forget that until recently people did not automatically expect to reach such an old age. My mother’s generation generally did not begin life expecting to live as long as so many of them did. Certainly, my mother didn’t, having been warned as a somewhat sickly child that she might not even make it to 16. Well, what do doctors know, anyway?

A person’s tombstone always features a name and two dates – the deceased’s date of birth and date of death, separated sometimes by a little dash. More important than the years, however, as Lincoln reminded us so tellingly, is the life lived in the dash between the dates. And it is in the life one lives that one becomes the person one will forever be in eternity.

As the only American-born child in a family of Italian immigrants, she inherited the heritage of the old world, reinforced by a brief but memorable sojourn as a child in the kingdom of Italy, while being firmly rooted in the promise of opportunity which had enticed her parents and so many others to uproot themselves, like Abraham of old, and to put down new roots in a land of promise.

From a distance, we look back on that life we shared with her and all the people that were a part of it, so many of whom are themselves gone now. But it was not an easy time. It was a struggle, as she used to say, just to make ends meet. And so I think it a special blessing that she got to enjoy as many years as she did – first, together with my father in their home in Westchester and then after my father’s illness and death a whole new life for her in California. It was a difficult challenge at her age to move across country. But how happy she was there, being near her daughter Linda and Nick and Claire and Laura. And all the friends she made there, so many friends, whom she treasured.

At my parents’ wedding, the priest would have instructed them about the life they were committing themselves to, in these once familiar words “That future, with its hopes and disappointments, its successes and its failures, its pleasures and its pains, its joys and its sorrows, is hidden from your eyes.” No longer hidden but fully lived, all those hopes, disappointments, successes, failures, pleasures, pains, joys, and sorrows accompany her now to the throne of the living God and his all-purifying grace

My mother struggled, as we all must, with the contradiction between who we are now and who God created us to become – until united with him in his kingdom we can finally see all things from God’s point of view and so experience the full effect of God’s patient, life-long transformation of us by his grace.

In their earthly lives, Martha and Mary and Lazarus had all responded to Jesus’ invitation by committing to him as to their own family. That invitation, extended to my mother as it has been to each of us, makes everything different from what it might otherwise have been. Having blessed my mother’s life, it now imparts new meaning to her death as, with confident hope and trust in God’s promises, we commend her forever to the new life of the Risen Christ.

What Was a Sunday?

On March 3, 321, the Roman Emperor Constantine made Sunday a legal holiday, a public day of rest, which it remained for almost 17 centuries - until living memory. I am old enough to remember when most businesses were closed on Sundays, when most people had the day off, when many marked the day by going to church in the morning, followed by a family Sunday dinner and other family-centered gatherings and activities. Now, of course, all sorts of business are open, and many are forced to work on Sunday, many of then unable to attend Sunday Mass as a result. There were all sorts of things that were wrong with the world when I was growing up, but Sunday was one of the things that that world got right, something sadly which we have lost to our own detriment and that of generations to come.

On February 12, 304, at Abitinae in Roman Africa, 49 Christians were martyred for having illegally celebrated Sunday Eucharist in defiance of Emperor Diocletian's edict. One of then, Emeritus, famously said: Sine dominico non possumus (We cannot be without the Lord's Day). Their heroic witness attests to the singular importance of Sunday in Christian worship and life. The loss of Sunday as a society-wide special day - largely in my own lifetime - represents a monumental loss for both the Church (whose weekly worship has suffered accordingly) and society (which has lost that traditional rhythm of rest and work).

Now, exacerbated by the pandemic, the loss of Sunday may be irretrievable. On Downton Abbey, the Dowager Countess of Grantham (Dame Maggie Smith) famously asked, "What is a weekend?" Will future generations have to ask, "What was a Sunday?"

(Photo: Bernini's Statue of Constantine, Saint Peter's Basilica at the base of the Scala Regia)