In 2009, is there really anything that is secret anymore? Earlier this year South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford was found to have a mistress after reporters started asking questions about his whereabouts.
First, his staff said that he was hiking on the Appalachian Trail and then reporters found him coming home from a flight from Argentina. It didn’t take long for the world to find out that Gov. Sanford was having an affair with María Belén Chapur. (I do have to give this to Mark; he picked the right type of a woman to have an affair with. I was in Buenos Aires when I was 13 and let me just say as a fair warning to all parents out there, never never never take your 13 year old son to Argentina. Something about Latin American women in a city with European Architecture, dinner at 11pm, dancing after and…, I digress). The most interesting part of this whole story is how we got to read his love letters:
“Have been thinking of you while watching the beautiful blue sea (a) great part of my day and remembering with a great smile on my face, the time we had spent together. As I told you before, you brought happiness and love to my life and (I) will take you forever in my heart. I wasn’t aware till we met last week, the strong feelings I had for you”
“…and you have my heart. You have oh so many attributes that pulls it in this direction. Do you really comprehend how beautiful your smile is? Have you been told lately how warm your eyes are and how they softly glow with the special nature of your soul. I remember Jenny, or someone close to me, once commenting that while my mom was pleasant and warm it was sad she had never accomplished anything of significance. I replied that they were wrong because she had the ultimate of all gifts — and that was the ability to love unconditionally. The rarest of all commodities in this world is love.”
I feel dirty just reading this private email, and yet there it is for anyone to Google on the internet. As my good friend Gary likes to say:
“With storage being as cheap as it is, nothing, published on the web, will ever be deleted again”
Don’t believe Gary? Check out the Way Back Machine.
Then we have the infamous ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky” quote from Bill Clinton:
But then the little dress became evidence:
Because this guy found out that certain dresses are kept as love tokens from jilted lovers.
And we all know what happened after that. I never thought I would long for the days of bitter partisan politics over an affair, but it sure seems like a much more simple time than the last decade of politics. We are deciding our allegiance to an issue based on the little “R” or “D” on our voter registration card not actually having a debate on the merits of the issue.
But the real news today comes from the following NPR article Democrats Could Learn From LBJ’s Medicare Push. James Morone, co-author of The Heart of Power: Health and Politics in the Oval Office, tell’s Renee Montagne that Johnson’s Medicare push is “one of the great untold stories.”
When Lyndon Johnson is elected, the first thing he decides is he wants Medicare, and he knows he needs Congressman Wilbur Mills (D-AR), chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. Mills has single-handedly fought Medicare and kept it bottled up in his committee. Johnson calls him and tries to get Medicare out of it, and Wilbur says, “I can’t, I’ve been fighting this thing, I’ll look like a fool.” And Johnson has the idea to triple the size of Medicare, to take the Republican proposals and add them on. And the two of them — these veteran, brilliant legislators — they concoct this whole new proposal that’s the administration proposal plus the Republican proposals
During a phone call to a young Ted Kennedy in 1962, LBJ explained how to get a bill passed:
“A health program yesterday runs $300 million, but the fools had to go to projecting it down the road five or six years, and when you project it the first year, it runs $900 million. Now I don’t know whether I would approve $900 million second year or not. I might approve 450 or 500. But the first thing Dick Russell comes running in saying, ‘My God, you’ve got a billion-dollar program for next year on health, therefore I’m against any of it now.’ Do you follow me?”
Morone goes on to say:
“We believe, after looking at the evidence, my co-author [David Blumenthal] and I, that if the true cost of Medicare had been known — if Johnson hadn’t basically hidden them — the program would never have passed. America’s second-most beloved program would never have happened, if we had had genuine cost estimates.” (emphasis mine)
Wow! “if Johnson hadn’t basically hidden them – the program would never had passed”. One of the best books that I have ever read is Robert Caro’s Means of Ascent about LBJ’s rise from Texas political hack to US Senator extraordinaire. LBJ honed his skills in Texas politics and was either loved or hated, but very few had a luke warm view of him. This account sums up LBJ pretty well.
Caro ends “Means of Ascent” with two anecdotes that illustrate the depth of that insecurity. Johnson was a tremendously complicated man. He stole elections and so convinced himself he didn’t that he worked himself into a genuine rage that Stevenson would try and deprive him of his victory. Yet he knew what he had done, and spoke as openly as one could of it without inviting indictment.
First, Caro tells of a joke that Johnson would tell in the Senate: a boy named Manuel is crying, and an older man asks him why. The boy says it is because his father came to town the week before, and didn’t come to see him. The older man gently reminds Manuel that his father died five years prior. Manuel sobs and says, “I know, but my father came to town last week and voted for Lyndon Johnson, and didn’t come to see me.”
And as President, Johnson would show a reporter a photograph he had kept of the men who controlled votes in Alice, Texas standing around a car. On the hood of the car was a ballot box, marked Precinct 13. It was taken on Election Day.
This would never had happened in the day and age of LBJ:
Can you imagine this:
All this makes me wonder, are we getting smarter because we are under more scrutiny by everything we do and say? Should I scrap my iPhone and MacBook Pro for a pigeon and a notebook, lest my entire life be published one day. Or do I become more scrupulous in my activities, lest my entire life be published one day?
It was a nice touch that the Obama administration released this data on a Friday afternoon, when the news cycle is notoriously dead. But it reminds me of my new favorite bumper sticker:
It really should say:
“Please don’t tell (insert any of the 535 congressman) what comes after a trillion”
Should we be scared or thankful that we live in 2009?
