Re: Michael Jackson -- Enough!

Ken to news media: Enough with the Michael Jackson coverage eclipsing every single other news event in the world. It's been eight solid days of nothing else.

He simply is --

• NOT THAT IMPORTANT and


• NOT THAT INTERESTING.

You are exploiting him just like everyone else!

Stop it!!! Thanks. --KenA

Al Franken makes it 60. But do Senate Super-Majorities Matter?

Sort of.

Democrats today are celebrating Al Franken's long-awaited victory as Minnesota's newest United States Senator. The cheers are not just for him. With Franken, Democrats will now number 58 in the Senate. This, along with two friendly Independents, will give them enough seats and potential votes - 60 - to block Republican filibusters and really control the Chamber.

That's real power. And it sounds great.

But don't believe it.

Over the years, we've had plenty of Congresses with large, lopsided partisan majorities. Some did great things. Others failed miserably. What mattered wasn't the size of the Majority, but whether it reflected a true national consensus, and whether it did its job.

The Scorecard on Cloture
First, the raw numbers.

The US Senate has always loved filibusters. Up until 1919, there was no way to stop a single Senator from talking his heart out and endlessly delaying a bill, thus killing it. Cloture, as adopted in 1919, allowed a majority of Senators to end debate, but only if they could muster a two-thirds vote. This was rare. From 1919 until 1970, Senators invoked Cloture only 8 times. Filibuster reigned supreme.

Then, in 1975, the Senate lowered its Cloture target to three-fifths, or 60 votes. Since then, cloture has been invokes literally hundreds of times, including 61 successful clotures during the 110th Congress (2006-7) alone.

During this post-1975 period, the only time either Democrats or Republicans had "filibuster-proof" majorities (60 or mote) was the four years 1975-1979: the Gerald Fold and Jimmy Carter era. During those four years, Senate leaders filed 62 cloture motions, voted on cloture 40 times, won on 20, and lost on 20. Not much to brag about. [Click here to see year-by-year votes for the enitre priod 1919-2009.]

The Biggest Majorities

This isn't to say that big Senate majorities can't produce terrific progress, clearing logjams for needed change. Three times in American history, we have seen large, sustained Super-Majorities in the U.S. Senate that made a difference:

• Civil War and Reconstruciton Era (1861-1875), when Republicans held overwhelming majorities, peaking in 1869 at 61-11 (equivalent to an 85-15 margin today);


• The FDR "New Deal" era and World War II (1933-1947), when Democrats held the whip hand by as much as 75-17 in 1937; and


• From 1959 through 1969, when Democrats consistently held margins above 60 seats, reaching 68 in 1966, the New Frontier and Great Society years. [Click here for the full list of party breakdowns, 1855-2009.]

These were creative periods with capable presidents (Licoln, FDR, Kennedy, Johnson) and national direction. They produced groundbreaking innovations. Arguably, the lower standard allowed some sloppy legislation and bad policy choices, but at least they managed to make decisions in times of crisis. Where they made bad ones, they were accountable.

And today?

Al Franken's 60th vote will matter only if Democrats -- Obama included -- use it wisely and skillfully. Their majority is fragile. But on any Senate vote, there are moderate Republicans to woo for every conservative Democrat lost. Is the country united behind fundamental change? What say you, Obama?

That's politics at the highest level. Now we'll see if they are up to it.

Photo of a pleasant afternoon.

This is one of my favorite snapshots: It's from Inauguration Day 1921, showing the Presidential limousine en route up Pennsylvania Avenue for the sweaing in. In the back seat, outgoing President Woodrow Wilson, sickly, having suffered a massive stroke (thrombosis) in late 1919, chats quietly with his replacement, incoming President Warren G. Harding, who had trounced Wilson's party in the 1920 November elections.

In the front seat, 84 year-old Joseph G. Cannon (R-Ill), long-time autocractic Speaker of the House nearing the end of his 48 years in Congress, stares ahead. He is without the trademark cigar stub clenched in his teeth, but pointedly refused to wear a formal top hat like the others.

The back-seat conversation?

Warren Harding later described it this way: He said he felt nervous around Wilson Wilson. So, to make small talk, he mentioned during the ride that he had a fondness for elephants based on his sister's having lived in Siam as a missionary, where she owned one as a pet. When Harding said he always wanted to own one himself, Wilson shot back: "I hope it won't turn out to be a white elephant." Wilson laughed.

Where they were going?

The sweaing-in went beautifully that day, the first ever to use an electronic amplifier so people standing in the cold could hear Warrn Harding's voice. By 1924, Harding's successor Calvin Coolidge would reach millions through radio. Wilson Wilson, however, grew tired during lunch and went home to rest rather than attend the ceremony.

Wilson and Harding both would be dead within three years. Harding would die mysteriously, apparently of food poisioning, returning by train from a trip to Alaska in August 1923. A few gossips would speculate that his strong-willed wife Florence poisoned him over his extramarital affairs. Harding's presidency would be remembered primarily for the Teapot Dome scandal, involving abuses in his Interior, Veterans, and Justice Departments (though not directly touching Harding), considered then the most disgraceful since the President Grant scandals of the 1870s.

Woodrow Wilson would die six months after Harding, in February 1924. He would spend his final years convalescing in a townhouse near Washington, D.C.'s Dupont Circle, despondant over his failure to win American approval of the Versailles Treaty, containing a League of Nations. Wilson had negotiated the treaty at the close of World War I and touted the League as justification of the loss of 100,000 American soldiers during the War. The ratification failure left his argument hollow.

Rather than securing peace, historians mostly would view the Versailles Treaty as simply planting the seeds for the even-bloodier World War II.

As for "Uncle Joe" Cannon, he would serve one more term in Congress and then retire to his home in rural Danville, Illinois. Cannon had been humiliated in 1910 when Congressional "Insurgents" -- a coalition of Progressives and Democrats chafing after years of Cannon's bullying -- stripped him of his powers in a famous St. Patrick's Day uprising on the House floor. As a result, Cannon lost his House seat altogether in 1912. But Cannon, duly chastened, made peace with his enemies and returned to Congress in 1914 for another either years. Not long after his 1926 death, Congress would honor him by putting his name its massive new office building, today a landmark of Capitol Hill.

Life in the moment.

But for now, they sat there amiably in the limousine, like three normal people on a pleasant afternoon, enjoying the fresh air, the company, and the crowds on the street, ignorant of the drama ahead. Three interesting people, barely acquaintances, with widely different pasts and futures, thrown together in a car for a fleeting encounter, each graceful enough to keep it pleasant. Life is made of moments like this.

See how I rated Wilson and Harding in the C-SPAN 2009 Historians Survey of Presidential Leadership.

Fame: Michael Jackson and Marilyn Monroe

There is an eerie parallel between the premature death of Michael Jackson, brilliantly talented but fragile and warped by fame, and that of Marilyn Monroe in 1962?

We don't know the full cause of Michael Jackson's death. Drugs and sycophants loom large, and accounts point to a lonely person exploited, pressued, finally broken by relentless over-exposed, the bubble existence of celebrity fame.

"A career is wonderful, but you can't curl up with it on a cold night," Marilyn Monroe said back in the 1960s when she, like Jackson, epitomized the bubble existence. "Dogs never bite me. Just humans."

On August 5, 1962, she too died suddenly of cardiac arrest. She too was achingly young, just 36 years old, beautiful, talented, bursting with personality and vulnerability. The autopsy found eight milligram percent of chloral hydrate and 4.5 milligram percent of Nembutal in her system, and blamed her death on "acute barbiturate poisoning," resulting from accidental overdose.

Marilyn Monroe too had compiled a brilliant career, with a sting of fabulous movies -- from comedies like Some Like it Hot and The Seven Year Itch to dramas like The Misfits. Oscar awards and nominations went to Jack Lemmon, Billy Wilder, John Huston, and others for these films; not Marilyn. Instead, the 1960s-version paparazzi savored her multiple marriages, including to Yankee slugger Joe DiMaggio and playwrite Arthur Miller, and her rumored affairs with John and Robert Kennedy. (Click here to hear her sing Happy Birthday to JKF.) Sex symbol? Fun, but it got old. "A sex symbol becomes a thing," she said toward the end. "I just hate to be a thing."

It wore on her, the exposure, the exploitaiton, the pressure. How exactly it killed her remains mystery. Her death spawned webs of conspiracy theories. Accidental overdose? Too simple for the ghoulish. Suicide? Murder? By the Kennedy's? J. Edgar Hoover? The Mob? More interesting. Books and magazine articles galore followed. More exploitation.

So with her. So with him. Who dares to say that American celebrity culture is not lethal? Just ask Princess Di about the British version.

Do you like a good forgery? Watch Abe Lincoln giving a talk.

Yes, that's right. No, you really cannot trust anything you see on the Internet. Take a listen.

No microphones or movie cameras existed yet in 1862. But no matter. The technology today for doctoring old footage is still rough. It's easy to spot a fake like this, and watching Lincoln's lips move along with the voice is creepy. But over time, this software will improve and "reality" some day may become like just another flavor of ice cream or another type of TV show.

Beware, my historian friends. If Abe Lincoln can look at you in the eye and speak convincingly in what appears like his own voice and his own words, then how much weight will our skeptical, academic, scholarly works continue to carry in comparison?

Gasp! Calvin Coolidge trying to give a speech.

Who was the worst ever President on on the stump?

With the now-not-so-new modern miracle of You-Tube rare old videos pop up all the time. As a result, we get to see just how bad some of the pre-TV Presidents were at trying to talk.

Take a listen to Calvin Coolidge chatting away on the White House lawn in 1924.

"Silent Cal" was not a terrible President. In the C-SPAN president's poll this year, I ranked him solidly mediocre, as number 20 out of 43.

He presided over the Roaring Twenties and Coolidge Prosperity. He left town just before the bubble burst in the 1929 Stock Crash.

Coolidge was an "Accidental President." Republicans nominated him to run for Vice President in 1920 after Coolidge, as Massachusetts Governor, took a strong stand in the 1919 Boston Police Strike. When President Warren G. Harding died of food poisoning in 1923 at the height of the Teapot Dome Scandal, Coolidge took the top job.

Watching Coolidge talking from notes in his raspy voice makes you cringe. Could he ever be elected to anything today? We judge public figures today so much by the TV standard, how smooth they appear, how stylish they look, how well they speak. Is it all fluff?

Enjoy the time capsule. Here''s the link.
href="Calvin'>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5puwTrLRhmw">Calvin Coolidge 1924.

Deep Sea Ocean Divers -- A Story

One of my history obsessions is with old deep sea ocean divers. Back in the 1800s, these hard-hat daredevils were pushing the limits of science and adventure to a shocking extent. Today, they are almost totally forgotten -- a crime.

Here's a piece I wrote for American Heritage Invention and Technology on one diver's near-fatal descent in 1886 on a shipwreck called The Oregon out in the Atlantic Ocean some 20 miles south of Fire Island, New York. It was over 110 feet deep in cold water with rough seas and blinding-bad visibility. Yet he did it with a copper helmet, rubber air-hose supplied by a hand-cranked pump, no lights, no gloves, and almost no scientific understanding of "the bends" or decompression. Just plenty of raw nerve.

Here's the link. Hope you enjoy it:

"An Incident on the Oregon: Deep-Sea Diving a Century Ago," American History Investion and Technology, 1994.