bush v gore

While everyone has a political slant, I am trying very hard to come across as objectively as possible here because the observation this is built on is objective in nature.  I'm very interested when I see similarities between people who others see as diametric opposites.  I've reworded several portions already to try to avoid sounding like I'm taking one perspective or the other, but word choice is almost never completely apolitical.

For a very long while, and definitely before Obama was elected in 2008, I have viewed George W. Bush and Barack Obama as very similar candidates.  Sure, they are very different in many respects to the point where Obama essentially ran against Bush's record in 2008, but I do think their similarities actually outnumber their differences.  I even believe this when looking at points of policy rather than personality.  Both men have campaigned at the opposite extremes of the political spectrum at one time or another, but aside from issues that almost every nationally-elected Republican and Democrat are obligated to disagree on, they ultimately ruled similarly.  This is especially the case when Bush's second term is the object of comparison rather than his first (a fact I'd attribute to Bush to asserting himself more in contrast to certain specific advisers).

For example, monetary policy under at least the second half of Bush's term and throughout Obama's term has been nearly identical. Some may point to the Fed and Ben Bernanke as the reason for that, but I think it has more to do with Treasury Secretary Geithner and his similarity to the multiple treasury secretaries that served under Bush.

Since I think Obama sort of fills a "Bush" role, I was interested to see Mitt Romney nominated on the GOP side.  If there has ever been a Republican that reminded me of Al Gore, Romney is it.  So, without being too political, the following are the similarities I see between Bush and Obama, and also Gore and Romney.

Bush and Obama

Both saw enormous spikes in popularity in their first year in office

This is sort of a fluke for both of them.  Bush was popular because he was the central stabilizing figure in the wake of 9/11.  Obama was popular because he literally and figuratively represented change from a system that a lot of people had become cynical about.  Neither of them saw their incredible levels of popularity last, but that's the way these things go.

Both more well liked personally than politically

This ties in to the last one.  Each presents himself as the type of person the average person would enjoy shooting the breeze with.  Both are very likable on a personal level.  Once they start making their policy positions known, however, they become more polarizing.

Both were lauded in their home state for being unifiers but were eventually seen on the national stage as being polarizing

I don't know if anyone else remembers this, but Bush sold himself in the first election as a "unifier, not a divider."  Obama, likewise, was supposed to usher in a new way of doing things in Washington.  Statements could be made defending or accusing either or both in this regard, but the point remains that this was a major selling point for both men at one point, and it was a way they attempted to contrast themselves with their political opponents.

Both initially ran on specific significant tax cut proposals, but were largely vague about other policy stance details

Enough said.

Both started their terms inheriting an economy headed south

Where a president's responsibility starts and stops regarding the economy is beyond the scope of this comment.  However, the seeds for the dot com bust were sown in the nineties and the seeds for the Great Recession were sown in the preceding decade.  Again, arguments can be made about who was responsible for how the economic situations progressed, but not here right now.

Both selected VP candidates with extensive resumes who could not realistically be elected president

Most VP choices in the last few elections have baffled me.  While Dick Cheney and Joe Biden may have been among the best choices made in the last twelve years, (depending on your opinions of Lieberman, Edwards, and Palin), they both confused me.  Cheney is smart and very good in debates, but he did not have apparent political aspirations, did not excite many people, and proved easy to cast as the villain.  Biden did, and probably still does, have political aspirations, and has a history of working through complicated foreign policy issues.  He also has a long history of saying very dumb things.  If nominated as a presidential candidate his odds of winning would be extremely long and would nearly rely on the GOP candidate being indicted for a felony.

Both, for good or for bad, increased access to and the size of the healthcare system by expanding the government's role in it

I'm not saying more on this right now.  There are positives and negatives that could be stated here, but my role at the moment is not to make value judgments.

Both were bailed out of a bind by General Petraus

Without General Petraus and his 2007 military surge, the odds are that the Middle East would look dramatically different now.  The geopolitical problems there that the surge addressed in this reality may have impacted the global economy by this point in a different reality due to the constraints on getting oil if the surge had not happened.  If Bush ever proves to have a legacy, the person who single-handedly saved it would be General Petraus.

Likewise, when President Obama had to replace General McChrystal in Afghanistan more or less overnight, the only person qualified in that short of notice to fill in the gap was Petraus.  Obama's opinion of Petraus' job must be good since he was nominated to be director of the CIA roughly a year ago.  Quite a change for someone Moveon.org targeted as a military stooge just a few years prior.

Gore and Romney

Both have boring personalities to a fault

In contrast to Bush and Obama, few people would want to chew the fat with Gore or Romney.  They are both monotone speakers who like to shift topics to things people in general are not interested in.  It blows me away that either have had any success in a field like politics, where personality matters more than most anything else.

That is me understating how uncharismatic both men are.

Both were originally elected to office in states that leaned the opposite political way

This may seem random, but I think that both of them being politicians from states that lean the opposite direction made them both more calculating.

Both selected VP candidates that separated them from the previous president of the same party

Joe Lieberman was on record severely criticizing President Clinton and was seen as the most morally aware option available to Gore.  Paul Ryan is to many conservatives the anti-Bush, someone who will deliver on a small-government promise that Bush did not.

Both had wives who were involved with awkward attempts to make their husbands seem more human

Here for Gore, and here for Romney.

Both had fathers who preceded them in political office

Okay, so did Bush.  The difference I see is that George W. Bush was not very similar to his dad in leadership style, and differed on policy as well.  Think about it this way: the younger Bush made a decision on a question only his father had faced to that point in whether to invade Iraq, and his dad chose very differently for the reason that Iraq might turn into a quagmire.

Romney's father was a moderate GOP governor from the north and Gore's father was a Tennessee senator.  I would argue that both lived in their fathers' shadows more than George W.

Both have made a lot of money in hedge fund management

Not merely investing in hedge funds, mind you, but taking leadership and founder roles.

More than in most election years, my main hope this election period is simply that whoever wins actually wins it on the night of the election rather than how the Bush/Gore election ultimately played out.  I am unequivocally ready for this to be over.

102 years

Today, I attended the funeral for my great-grandmother who was 102 years old.  As I only knew her in the later decades of her life I only knew her as a somewhat rough-edged individual.  From the stories I have heard she had always been blunt and capable of getting her hands dirty to the point of killing whatever needed to be killed with her hands or a shotgun on the farm, so I think elements of that personality were probably there when she was younger as well.

What has always struck me, and what I gave a lot of thought to this weekend, was how she essentially lived two lifetimes.

Her husband, and my great-grandfather, lost his first wife during childbirth.  So, she married him as his second wife as a teenager, and was eleven years his younger.  She had seven kids of her own plus his daughter from the previous marriage, and so she lived the life of a farm wife until her husband's death in 1962 when he was 63 and she was 52.  Their youngest son at the time was two days short of his thirteenth birthday.

I don't know too much about her life from the years immediately after her husband's death, but I do know that in the seventies she moved from the Midwest to Arizona with my grandparents to assist in missions work on the Navajo reservation in Arizona.  She was there over twenty years before coming back with them to Missouri where she lived another sixteen years.  Those years had to have been strikingly different from what she had lived up to that point in her life.

I can see how some of the segments of my own life are very different from others, but I have not even reached one third of the life that she has led.  When I think of life being short I think in terms of living seventy or eighty years.  At this stage of my life, one hundred years feels like more time than I would even want.  As she was married into her fifties then lived another fifty unattached, that had to feel like she was two different people.  That's how I believe I would feel in that same situation.

Coming full circle back to my grandmother's personality, it was very strong.  She had zero qualms telling anyone what she thought of whatever and whoever.  As a result, she was incredibly blunt.  She also did what needed to be done, at least when she was physically capable of it.  As she has a strong personality, it makes complete sense that she would establish her own way for the fifty years that she outlived my great-grandfather.

In any case, they are meeting up again now for the first time in literally decades.  That has to be joyous.

the talk

During my typical morning contemplation in the shower this morning it occurred to me that either NJ or CD will probably ask about where babies come from in the near future.  NJ just turned six, but hasn't asked yet largely out of lack or interest of things baby-related.  CD, at three-and-a-half is very interested in babies, so I was wondering who would ask first.

A mere eight hours later I caught Golden explaining to CD in very simple terms where babies come from.  CD had told Golden that babies were cut out of mommies' bellies.  Golden explained that this sometimes happens, but there is usually a different way for the baby to come out.  Golden did a great job of giving the right amount of information for where CD is without acting awkward.

Golden and I have long agreed that we would be up front and honest as possible to questions about where babies come from, and eventually questions about sex.  There are a lot of reasons for that, and we both agree that the benefits of being up-front outweigh the drawbacks.  All of that being said, I don't feel real confident I know the line where to balance over-sharing information.

I think my impression is largely due to the fact that the people with the more extreme opinions are most likely to share them, but it seems to me that most of the opinions I have heard about discussing sex with kids has been from either extreme.  Either parents are over-sexualizing their kids by not protecting them from knowledge about things until they are mature enough to understand them or they are causing them to be sexually repressed by making natural things appear evil.  I'd like us to strike a proper balance, but that's a fine line to establish.

I think that there are certainly some real dangers to both extremes, but my real concern is that I feel that if this is something that we cannot discuss in our household that damages Golden's and my ability to influence NJ's and CD's understanding of sex, and can cause serious problems and heartache later.  It is a parent's responsibility to ready their kids for their adult lives, and sexuality is a huge part of that.  We would be failing as parents if we ceded this responsibility to whatever will fill in that knowledge gap.

Here's hoping and praying our next talk is not for another couple of years, though.

remembering forrest

There are two dangers in my posting a memory about Forrest.  The first danger is that it will be all about me, which is something he would absolutely call me on if he were still here.  The second danger is that I gush.  He'd call me on that too.

As I have noted, my friend Forrest went to be with God a couple of weeks ago.  While his illness had a sense of inevitability about it, as he had a form of cancer that very few people survive more than half a year, it has only hit home with me now that he is gone.

Seven years ago, Forrest utilized his influence encouraged a group of friends to start blogs to express ourselves and stay connected.  That is how this blog originated.  He moved on to other forms of expression as the years went on, including a successful and prolific level of painting.  Even without him being here directly, though, his influence remained with me and the others who continued to write and interact.

Probably due to my selfish nature most of my friendships are structured in ways that the relationship can meet some specific social need I have.  For example, I have some friendships with people I can laugh about specific things, I have some friendships with people with whom I can discuss specific topics, and I have some friendships with people who I can share specific experiences.  While I only saw Forrest once every few weeks over the last two or three years, I am realizing now how significant he had become in my social world.  I have already had several instances where I thought that some specific thing would be great to discuss with Forrest, then remembered that is not a possibility.

The aspect of Forrest's character or personality that I appreciated most was how incredibly easy it was to be honest around him.  We could be open, straightforward, and sometimes blunt with each other in our discussions.  It was often to a fault.  Among our group of friends who met at Homer's Coffeehouse I could discuss topics and opinions that I would not bring up in many other contexts.  That was largely due to the atmosphere that Forrest brought to the group.

Forrest was a great friend who I was very fortunate to get to connect with.  His memory and influence will always be with me, and he will always be missed.

If I miss him some, I know that his family misses him a hundred, a thousand, or a million times more.  I can only pray that God will provide each of them peace through the grief.  Please remember them in your prayers.

cross to bear

A while back another mother of one of NJ's preschool classmates told Golden that she did not know if she could handle a situation we were dealing with regarding NJ at the time as a compliment to her patience.  Within a couple of months we received word that that mother had to deal with her son having a medical situation far, far worse than we have dealt with for either of our kids yet.

Unless he or she had a traumatic childhood, I do not think the typical person realizes the severity of the challenges that most people have to face in life until they are no longer considered a young adult.  Everyone has something, and that something is usually huge.  I feel like almost every family I know has some issue that I do not know how I would deal with.  Whether it is serious illnesses/death, miscarriages, affairs, divorces, major financial hardships, perpetual unemployment, mental/emotional instability, or simply rebellious children, almost no one is immune.  It also seems like all of this bad stuff is from recent years.

I know that a lot of bad stuff happened to people I knew when I was a kid, but a lot of that stuff is usually shielded from kids.  As an example, it may sound uncaring but when you hear about an adult in the hospital as a youth it does not sound unexpected.  You don't get the morbid details of the complications that person goes through, and it rarely directly impacts you.  Older people end up in hospitals, and you don't have an appreciation for someone in their thirties or forties being relatively young.  It's simply another name brought up for a prayer request.  That changes as an adult when forty isn't old any more and I am more closely acquainted with those who are sick.

To be fair, there are difficulties that Golden and I face.  In a vacuum they often seem serious, but when I compare to others, we do not have it that bad.  A lot of what we do face has to do with being parents of two energetic kids, so those difficulties even frequently have benefits that far outweigh them.

Given how poorly I have handled the curve balls that life has thrown me, I have some doubts about how I would handle a more serious hardship.  My crosses seem horrible until I see some of what others have to tolerate.  God, give them strength.

please pray

My friend Forest, whom about half my readers know, needs your prayers.  He has a very serious form of cancer and direct intervention from God is currently his hope, and unfortunately his only hope.  Please also pray for his family as well, as they need strength and peace as much as Forest does.

I am not abandoning the blog, and will likely put something up in the very near future.  I simply have not been in the mood to compose something, as everything I have sat down to type has felt trite in comparison.  Not to fear, though, my standards will go down to my normal level shortly and I will post again.

Update (7/6/2012):

Forest passed away yesterday.  Please remember his family in your prayers.

boundaries

I frankly don't know precisely where boundaries should be drawn in my life.  I never have.  In college I became overly active in classwork, student government, work, and maintaining a relationship with Golden and nearly burned out mid-way through my third semester.  A few times in my adult life I have swung the opposite direction and purposefully shut down nearly all offers for social activities beyond what was absolutely necessary.

I'm somehow guarded and over-sharing at the same time in my friendships.  In my close relationships I don't usually know what reasonable and unreasonable expectations are.  Do I expect too much or too little?  Do I sacrifice too much or too little?  Again, I think it's paradoxically both, but I usually cannot identify the specifics of what needs to change.

In social situations I frequently miss social cues, though I also notice people who miss them much more than I do.  Some people seem to be able to feel out others in a way that I can only dream.  Other people seem to miss what I think are obvious signs that whatever they are doing violates whatever the local social mores are.

The thing is, the more I think about this, the more I think this describes most people.  There is definitely a small group of people who seem to get where all of the social and personal boundaries are or should be, and there is a small group of  people who have no clue.  In the middle, though, I think everyone relies on others' reactions to figure out the grey areas.  What happens, though, when the people we use for reference have it wrong?