The Saga of Sarah Comes to a Close

From Wikipedia, official government portrait used for press secretary twitter account.

I don’t appreciate some liberals who have mocked Sarah Huckabee Sanders—sure, she graduated form a Baptist university in Arkansas, but she was never empty. I teach at a private, religious university, too--and it's a place where future American leaders can be educated. Presidents don't all have to come from Harvard. And comments about her appearance were just as misogynist as comments conservatives made about Hillary Clinton’s wardrobe choices and face.

As this New Yorker story covers, Sanders is a pretty savvy political creature. She is a smart lady.

It’s not a joke that she might get to be governor of Arkansas. She might even someday be our first female president—after all, as Donald Trump showed, truth telling is not a requirement for the highest office in the land these days.

But Sanders was a terrible press secretary. Despite private rapport with reporters, she very publicly was perfectly willing to echo to worst lies of the worst president in U.S. history, and showed his public contempt for the press. A press secretary, even one for a lying president, has no business lying to reporters, as Sanders did repeatedly.

Still, there is another side of the story. The Washington press core is elitist and liberal. That doesn’t mean they don’t have an important role that most of them take seriously and professionally try to fulfill, but I don’t see any point in denying that a particular side of the political spectrum is over-represented in the Washington press.

And yet—it’s not the White House’s place to choose who covers the White House. The press, flawed and biased as it is, is there to get answers for the American people. Journalists have an important function in our democracy, one that Huckabee Sanders, representing her authoritarian boss, publicly attacked.

The president will no doubt name a new press secretary. Who it is may make some difference, but probably not much. This deeply flawed, anti-American president has declared the media the “enemy” of the American people, and his press secretaries have merely been the front line troops in his ongoing war with truth and facts and the American way.

And the sad truth is that much of the Republican base agrees with Trump, partly out of frustration at the sense of being looked down on by media elites. And, like Trump, Sanders is not what’s wrong with the modern Republican party—her flawed press secretary tenure represented a very real, and very dangerous anti-media bias that today is common up and down the Republican party. In Iowa, too many Republican candidates have refused, for instance, to participate in media voter guide questionnaires or meetings with newspaper editorial boards. That’s a dangerous and too common precedent.

The mainstream media is an endangered species these days. The staffs of newsrooms have been severely cut back since the 2008 recession. Republicans seem to relish the extinction of the species. That’s a mistake. Liberal bias or not, journalism is the lifeblood of a democracy. The Republican party seems full of vampires who are willing to drain that blood.

And Sarah is an intelligent, determined and dangerous blood sucker who sadly is very much at home in that party.

Memoir, Michelle Style

Have you read “Becoming” by Michelle Obama?

I think you should. Robert Mueller told us all to read the report, and I actually bought a copy (along with several Donald Westlake book) in a San Francisco book store.

And while visiting the West Coast, I was visiting with Michelle, too. "Becoming" is what I read on the plane ride there and in the evening. I liked her story for lots of reasons, not the least of which that we both grew up in the Midwest in the same era. She’s younger than me, and Chicago is not Clinton, Iowa, nor Muscatine, Iowa—but it was interesting how, when Barak ran for president, Michelle Obama found that she could relate with Iowans.

Chicago is not that far away, and I felt some kinship with Michelle Obama.

The book has a point of view—it is written by a Democrat, clearly. But she is not exactly a political animal in the sense that her life partner is—in fact, I can sympathize with her desire to not be in politics, although I honestly would vote for Michelle Obama for just about anything.

She came from roots I can relate to, and struggled with her public life in terms that I could understand. I miss President Obama, partly because he had an eloquence sadly lacking in our current president. It’s nice to have proof that his life partner is similarly gifted.

I left my book in San Francisco. I hope my son and daughter-in-law will enjoy it—I did.

Loved browsing at City Lights in San Francisco--above, what came home with me, below, the store, a crowded, interesting quirky shrine to literacy.