Beyond the Pale

This political season has no monopoly on lunacy or dirty tricks, to be sure, but it’s got to rank pretty high on that all-time list — or low, depending how you look at it. The examples are numerous — but let me pick just one off the top.

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is reportedly a smart, visionary fellow, but you would never know it sometimes by the loopy things that come out of his mouth. You tend to expect more intelligent things from Gingrich, but sometimes he slips off into an ethereal region all his own. For example, he and others have recently been reported to have charged that President Obama is surrounded by Keynesian nitwits, or words to that effect. That’s a strange charge in any political season because most people don’t have a clue what “Keynesian” means.

On the surface, it supposedly refers to the economic philosophy of John Maynard Keynes, the noted British economist who has greatly influenced economic policy throughout the world. For one thing, he advocated using fiscal and monetary measures to alleviate the impact of recessions and depressions. Both Democrat and Republican administrations have turned to Keynesian policies when the economy went into a tail spin. Most of us think only of the actions taken by President Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression and President Obama in the recent Great Recession. But, President George W. Bush also turned to Keynesian measures with his tax cuts in 2008 to stimulate the economy and with the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP as it is better known, also enacted during the latter part of the Bush Administration.

So, why use that charge against President Obama and his team? I suspect the real reasons are more sinister than first meet the eye. First of all, as noted earlier, “Keynesian” is unfamiliar and sounds foreign, so to many people it must mean something bad, reminding me of the campaign tactic attributed to the late Senator George Smathers from Florida who once allegedly accused his opponent of practicing monogamy and his actress wife of being a thespian.

Then, just this morning it occurred to me that the word “Keynesian” sounds like “Kenyan,” as in somebody from — you got it — Kenya in Africa. Too much of a stretch, you say? Don’t forget, a ridiculously high percentage of Americans still believe President Obama wasn't born in this country and is therefore an illegitimate President. So, there is fertile soil out there for sowing such seeds. More to the point, Gingrich and others picked up on the charge by the conservative thinker Dinesh D’Sousa that the reason Obama doesn’t “get us” real Americans is because he is really a frustrated Kenyan anti-colonialist. I am not making this stuff up. It’s all there in print and TV for those with eyes to see and ears to hear.

Like the George Smathers’ incident, it would be funny if it weren’t so sick and pathetic. This is an important election coming up in November and with the U.S. still in a troubled economy and facing other huge problems, domestically and around the world, it’s no time to turn to xenophobes who are fanning the flames of fear and bigotry to help “take back America.” Take it back to “where” is not clear.  Apparently, back to some utopian America that existed at some time in the misty past. If so, I missed it. I go back 72 years and the good ol’ days weren’t all that good. Trust me —I was there.
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This country needs to move forward, not backward, and this election is about the proper roles of government and the private sector and which party has the best chance of taking us there under the current circumstances. To me, that’s an easy call.