This past Sunday’s New York Times suggested that the current political season might be termed the season of the flip-flop.

Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, has flip-flopped on abortion and gay rights, and Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York, had an epiphany of his own on gun control, and is now courting the National Rifle Association.

Judging from what she said during the last debate among Democrat presidential hopefuls, New York senator Hilary Clinton isn’t flip-flopping exactly, but she is loath to take a clear stand on most any controversial issue. For example, she said previously that a proposal by Governor Eliot Spitzer of New York to give illegal immigrants driver licenses “makes a lot of sense” -- and then said during the debate, “I did not say it should be done.”

All this bobbing and weaving reminds me of a story that Sen. Everett McKinley Dirksen (1896-69) used to tell. A man was filling out an application for life insurance, and one of the questions was, “How did you father die?”

The man paused. His father had been hanged as a horse thief, and there was no way he was going to record that shameful fact on an insurance form. So he thought quickly, and then penned this ingenious answer: “My father was cut off in his 43rd year, when the platform gave way beneath him while participating in a public function.”

Dirksen, a Republican from Illinois, served with great distinction as Senate Minority leader from 1959 until his death ten years later. But he did his own share of political bobbing and weaving. His glib tongue and mellifluous voice earned him the sobriquet, “The Wizard of Ooze.”

As Dirksen himself once put it, “I am a man of fixed and unbending principles, the first of which is to be flexible at all times.”

Dirksen would feel right at home amid today’s presidential contenders.

I said in my last post that the late Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen (R-IL) would feel right at home among today’s flip-flopping presidential hopefuls. Indeed, when Dirksen first ran for the Senate in 1950, the Chicago Sun-Times ran an analysis of his voting record in the House of Representatives, accusing him of switching his position on military preparedness 31 times, on isolationism 62 times and on farm policy 70 times during his 16 years in Congress.

Dirksen saw himself as a pragmatist rather than an opportunist and, for all his artful dodging, he was capable of principled and courageous political stands. His finest hour came when he secured passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Die-hard segregationists, who were mainly Democrats, mounted the longest filibuster in the history of the Senate –- 83 days -- to prevent passage of this landmark legislation. The only way to break the filibuster was by cloture –- a vote to end debate. Unfortunately, under the rules of the Senate at that time, a motion to invoke cloture required more than a simple majority. Two-thirds of all senators had to vote in favor. Had Dirksen, the leader of the Republicans, lined up with the southern Democrats, the civil rights bill would have never reached the floor.

Dirksen had reservations about the bill, and offered numerous amendments in an effort to break the logjam. Finally, on June 10, 1964, he was ready to move. Dirksen was then nearly 70 and in poor health. He was exhausted from working 14-to-16 hour days. But he made a moving speech in favor of the cloture motion.

"There are many reasons why cloture should be invoked and a good civil rights measure enacted,” Dirksen told the hushed Senate chamber. “It is said that on the night he died, Victor Hugo wrote in his diary substantially this sentiment, 'Stronger than all the armies is an idea whose time has come.' The time has come for equality of opportunity in sharing of government, in education, and in employment. It must not be stayed or denied."

The motion to invoke cloture was carried, and the civil rights bill became law.

Sunday, November 11, is Veterans’ Day. In honor of the occasion, I’m going to share one of the best recent tributes I’ve read to the men and women who have served this country in our armed forces.

It’s by Ben Stein, so it’s a bit quirky, but it’s heartfelt, nonetheless. It comes from Mr. Stein’s new book, The Real Stars (New Beginnings Press, $14.95).

In an essay in the book entitled, “Gratitude”, Stein talks about doing some holiday shopping in Beverly Hills about two days before Christmas a few years ago. He describes the almost perfect weather, the hustle and bustle of the happy shoppers and the vulgar affluence that is characteristic of Beverly Hills. In the process, he makes some mildly comical observations about a middle-aged woman getting a foot massage.

Then comes the kicker:

“None of this,” he writes, “absolutely none of it, would be there without the men and women of our armed forces. Every bit of what we have by virtue of being a free and prosperous nation, every ability to buy whatever book we want at Dutton’s, every ability we have to come here from foreign lands to escape oppression, every speck of a chance we have to make it and become prosperous enough to have foot massages -- all this is behind the shield of the United States Army, Marines, Navy, Air Force, National Guard and Reserves. Every speck of everything good we have by having full pantries and full stomachs is because someone died for us at Bastogne or Tarawa. Every Jewish person like me … owes our bare survival to the men and women who fought and won World War II. Hollywood didn’t do it. Martha Stewart didn’t do it. Donald Trump didn’t do it. The U.S. Congress didn’t do it. Men and women from places like Prescott, Arkansas, and Bedford, Virginia –- people we never heard of –- they are the ones who did it.”

How do we as a nation pay the debt we owe our veterans –- and to the men and women on active duty today? Well, we can’t –- at least not in full. But we can put something on account.

Mr. Stein has a few suggestions as to what might constitute an appropriate down payment. He writes: “Pay them more. Send their kids to school for free. Love them. Take them into our hearts. In the privacy of our homes –- a privacy that their lives assured –- be on our knees with gratitude to God that he sent such great souls into our lives.”

Amen to that. Happy Veterans' Day: to all who served, and to all on active duty.

And thank you.

Old stories never die; they just get updated every few years.

Case in point is the story I mentioned a few posts back that the late Senator Everett Dirksen liked to tell. A man was asked on an application for life insurance how his father had died. Rather than admit that his father had been hanged as a horse thief, he wrote, “My father was cut off in his 43rd year, when the platform gave way beneath him while participating in a public function.”

My friend an fellow-blogger Eugene Finerman (http://finermanworks.com/your_rda_of_irony) sent me an updated version of that story that he received from a friend of his. I presume the friend found it on the Internet. It goes like this:

Judy Wallman, a professional genealogical researcher, discovered that Hillary Clinton's great-great uncle, Remus Rodham, was hanged for horse stealing and train robbery in Montana in 1889.

“Remus Rodham was a famous cowboy in the Montana Territory. His business empire grew to include acquisition of valuable equestrian assets and intimate dealings with the Montana railroad. Beginning in 1883, he devoted several years of his life to service at a government facility, finally taking leave to resume his dealings with the railroad. In 1887, he was a key player in a vital investigation run by the renowned Pinkerton Detective Agency. In 1889, Remus passed away during an important civic function held in his honor when the platform upon which he was standing collapsed.”

Eugene referred the friend who sent him the above item to my post on Everett Dirksen. I wonder where Dirksen found it.

I’m a little late, but I want to take note of an absolutely superb speech that French president Nicholas Sarkozy gave to Congress last week on November 7.

Franco-American relations have, to put it mildly, been strained in recent years. With this speech, President Sarkozy, already known to be friendly to America, did much to bury the bitterness and get our two countries working together once again on matters of mutual concern.

As Monsieur Sarkozy observed, America and France are friends: “Friends may have differences; they may have disagreements; they may have disputes. But in times of difficulty, in times of hardship, friends stand together, side by side; they support each other; and help one another.”

He then did a masterful job of celebrating the highlights of Franco-American friendship:

The deliberations of your Congress are conducted under the double gaze of Washington and Lafayette. Lafayette, whose 250th birthday we are celebrating this year and who was the first foreign dignitary, in 1824, to address a joint session of Congress. What was it that brought these two men—so far apart in age and background—together, if not their faith in common values, the heritage of the Enlightenment, the same love for freedom and justice?

What made America great was her ability to transform her own dream into hope for all mankind.

Magnifique!

Monsieur Sarkozy continued in this vein, invoking the sacrifices that young Americans made for French freedom in the two world wars, American aid to rebuild Europe through the Marshall Plan, and America’s role as “the bulwark of the Free World” during the Cold War.

Monsieur Sarkozy devoted most of his speech to winning over his audience. When he felt his conquest was complete, he felt himself secure enough to make this rather daring conclusion:

Allow me to express one last conviction: Trust Europe.

Long live French-American friendship!

These few brief excerpts can’t do justice to the whole speech. The full text can be found on the web site of the New York Sun: http://www.nysun.com/article/66054.

I warmly commend it to your attention.

I just hope that President Sarkozy survives the latest rash of strikes in his country. The world desperately needs statesmen of his caliber.

Richard Wagner scored his first triumph as an operatic composer when his third opera, Rienzi, took Dresden by storm in 1842.

The opera takes place in Rome during the 14th Century. The people of Rome, exasperated by the endless bloody struggle for power between the noble houses of Orsini and Colonna, turn –- literally -– to a man on a white horse to deliver them. They rally to a charismatic commoner named Cola di Rienzi, who promises to suppress the rapacious nobles, end corruption and civil strife and restore the glories of the Roman republic.

Too romantic a scenario for American politics in the 21st Century? No doubt. But reading the recaps of Sen. Barack Obama’s speech at the Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Iowa last week last week recalled the opera to my mind.

I noted in particular the following paragraphs from the senator’s speech:

Our moment is now!

I am not in this race to fulfill some longheld ambitions or because I believe it's somehow owed to me. I never expected to be here. I always knew this journey was improbable. I am running in this race because of of what Dr. King called "the fierce urgency of now." Because I believe that there’s such a thing as being too late, and that hour is almost upon us.

By all accounts, it was a spellbinding performance that generated an enormous ovation at the end.

Sen. Obama apparently believes that the American people are fed up with both the ongoing Bush-Clinton dynastic warfare and the hooliganism that currently passes for national political discourse. They want a change. They want an end to mudslinging and the zero-sum politics that inevitably produces gridlock and frustration. They want a return to old-fashioned civic virtue, political pragmatism and the kind of constructive democracy that gets things done.

If Obama is right, he may even now become the black man on the white horse who rides it all the way to the White House.

Maestro –- strike up the overture to Rienzi, if you please.

My friend and fellow-speechwriter Tack Cornelius reminds me by email that today is the 144th anniversary of Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg.

I guess we can’t be reminded too often of the power of Lincoln’s prose. If we take his literary genius for granted, his contemporaries most certainly did not. Indeed, when Lincoln won the presidential nomination in 1860, one newspaper editor demanded, “Who will write this ignorant man’s state papers?”

We laugh at such a question today, but at the time there was good reason to look on Lincoln as –- if not an ignorant man -– at least a man who lacked formal education. Aside from attending local schools in Kentucky for two brief terms when he was a small boy, Lincoln was wholly self-educated.

How then, did this barely-literate country boy become the Lincoln of letters? Some of us know that Lincoln was devoted to the King James Bible and the plays of Shakespeare. But his education as a writer was broader than that. The historian Douglas L. Wilson has traced Lincoln’s progress as a writer in two excellent books, Honor’s Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln and Lincoln’s Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words.

According to Wilson, Lincoln –- like any aspiring writer –- was a voracious reader. Young Abe read all the books he could get his hands on, Lincoln’s stepmother later recalled, and when he found a passage that struck him he would write it down on boards if he had no paper. He kept a copybook of his favorite quotes and re-read them often.

In addition to Shakespeare, Lincoln read the English romantic poets and the poems of Robert Burns. Some of his friends said that Lincoln knew practically the whole of Burns by heart.

As for writing, John L. Scripps, one of Lincoln’s first biographers, offers this tantalizing glimpse of Lincoln when he was about six or seven years old: “It was his custom to form letters, to write words and sentences wherever he found suitable material. He scrawled them with charcoal, he scored them in the dust, in the sand, in the snow –- anywhere and everywhere that lines could be drawn, there he improved his capacity for writing.”

Scripps adds that Lincoln’s talent as a writer was recognized early on. Lincoln’s parents were illiterate, as were most of their neighbors, so while he was still a boy, Lincoln became the family and the neighborhood scribe. According to Scripps, Lincoln’s role in this regard was due not merely to the fact that he could write and was obliging, but because of “his ability to express the wishes and feelings of those for whom he wrote in clear and forcible language.”

There was yet another aspect of Lincoln’s development as a writer. As Gary Wills observed, "Lincoln, like most writers of great prose, began by writing bad poetry."

A poem Lincoln wrote around 1844, when he was in his mid-30s, shows the influence of Burns and, possibly, John Greenleaf Whittier:

My childhood home I see again,
And sadden with the view;
And still as memory crowds my brain,
There’s pleasure in it too.

Lincoln realized that such lines were hardly the stuff of great poetry. But even at an early age, he seemed to have sensed that he had a destiny as a writer. A half-humorous entry he made in his notebook during his teen years reads as follows:

Abraham Lincoln
His hand and pen
He will be good but
God knows when.

God knew, and today we all know. But the process by which Lincoln went from scrawling words in the dust to writing words that would be chiseled in marble is something that we know only in part. The rest will remain forever a mystery.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day, on which we give thanks for the bounty we enjoy as Americans. If we stop to think about it, we owe our material prosperity to our exuberant free-enterprise system.

This was not always so. In fact, our Pilgrim forbears initially based their Plymouth Plantation on collectivist principles. In the beginning, the rule in Plymouth was share and share alike. Nobody owned anything, and whatever was produced became the common property of all.

This was poor economics and bad psychology. Since everyone would receive the same no matter how hard he or she worked, there was no incentive to excel. The community foundered and nearly starved.

Finally, communal living was abolished. Each settler was given his own tract of land to cultivate. The colony’s fortunes immediately improved, and the result was the first Thanksgiving in 1623.

In his history of Plymouth, Governor William Bradford summarized the great lesson that his people had learned by this experience. The language is quaint, but the message is a pertinent as ever:

The experience that was had in this commone course and condition, tried sundrie years, and that among Godly and sober men, may well evince the Vanitie of that conceite of Plato’s and other ancients, applauded by some of later times, that the taking away of propertie and bringing in communitie into a commone wealth would make them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God!

Amen, Governor Bradford. And Happy Thanksgiving to all.

The ascendancy of the handlers, spin doctors and consultants over American politics for the past twenty years or so has made me nostalgic for Popeye.

Remember Popeye? He was the cartoon sailor who wasn’t afraid to say, “I yam what I yam and that’s all that I yam.” Fancy one of today’s presidential contenders saying something like that. The handlers would throw a bag over his head and drag him off before he got half the words out.

My one hope is that the consultants will outsmart themselves, and an article in the November issue of Harper’s gives me hope that they will. The article is, “Making Mitt Romney: How to Fabricate a Conservative” by Ken Silverstein.

Mr. Silverstein tells the nauseating story of how Romney’s campaign employed over a hundred political consultants, paying them a total of at least $11 million. The object was to recast Mr. Romney -- a Mormon, a political moderate and the former governor of one of the most liberal states in the union -- into the kind of conservative who could appeal to the GOP’s evangelical base.

The result was mush. Romney’s speeches were reduced to such bromides as, “There is no place more important to the future strength of America than the American home.”

Furthermore, his flip-flops on controversial social issues like abortion and gay rights gave the impression that the man had no core convictions at all.

But the consultants got their way, and here’s Mr. Silverstein’s conclusion: “By all accounts, Mitt Romney is smart and pragmatic – not at all as vacuous, that is, as he has been made to sound. The irony is that in attempting to market him to the Republican base, his handlers have created a thorough phony.”

And the voters have noticed.

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee has tripled his support in Iowa since July, and is currently neck-and-neck with Romney in that key state. And Huckabee’s strongest supporters are the evangelical Protestants that Romney tied himself into knots trying to win.

Worst of all, it’s now too late for Romney to just be himself and run on the authentic qualities and experience he has that would make him an attractive candidate for president. At this point it would just look like more spin.

Popeye knew better.

Quick! Name as many of America’s Founding Fathers as you can.

Most educated Americans, and most historians, would probably name Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton. After that, we’d either run out of names, or else there would be vigorous arguments over who deserved to be ranked with such distinguished company.

But why so few? And why these few, rather than others? The Declaration of Independence had 56 signers, and the convention that drew up our Constitution had 55 delegates. And that is to say nothing of the many other patriots who contributed heroically to making us a nation. Why do we really know only a handful of them?

This question is explored in a fascinating essay published in the fall issue of The Intercollegiate Review. The essay is, “Founders Famous and Forgotten”, by Daniel L. Dreisbach, Professor of Justice, Law, and Society at American University in Washington, D.C.

According to Professor Dreisbach, there are a variety of reasons why so many of America’s founders have been neglected. Age is one. Some founders were older than the ones we remember, and died before they could play starring roles in the new republic they helped to create. Of the five famous founders, only Franklin, who died in 1790, did not go on to hold high federal office, whereas Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison were respectively the first, second, third and fourth presidents of the United States, and Hamilton was the first secretary of the treasury.

Other founders didn’t leave enough of a paper trail for historians to follow. One signer of the Declaration of Independence, John Witherspoon of New Jersey, was doubly disadvantaged in this respect. A native of Scotland and an eminent theologian, Witherspoon served as president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University). Many of his private papers were burned when the college and his home were sacked by the vengeful British after the Battle of Princeton. Witherspoon himself completed the holocaust by ordering the destruction of many of his papers upon his death.

Still other founders took unpopular stands that diminished their reputations. John Dickinson refused to sign the Declaration of Independence, because he considered it premature and intemperate. Notwithstanding the fact that he later fought in the Revolution and served as elected chief executive of both Delaware and Pennsylvania, his reputation never recovered.

Similarly, George Mason of Virginia fiercely opposed the ratification of the Constitution –- which he helped to draft -- because the finished document contained no Bill of Rights. It was largely because of Mason’s insistence that a Bill of Rights was soon added to the Constitution and, when it was, it was based on the earlier Virginia Declaration of Rights, which Mason had authored. But Mason’s enormous contribution to our civil liberties remains forever overshadowed by his earlier fight against ratification.

Having strong religious opinions, either pro or con, is another way that certain of our founders unwittingly courted obscurity. Liberal historians like to think of the Founding Fathers as men of the Enlightenment; that is, as deists and rationalists. So they have given short shrift to those founders –- such as Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, Roger Sherman, John Jay and the aforementioned John Witherspoon -- who were motivated by deep religious convictions. At the other extreme, Tom Paine was damned by Teddy Roosevelt and other orthodox believers as that “filthy little atheist.”

Finally, some of our founders were forgotten because they were embarrassing. Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania, who is credited with writing the Preamble to the Constitution (“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union …”) was a notorious rake and lecher. So history swept him under the carpet. Much the same fate befell James Wilson of North Carolina. Wilson was a brilliant lawyer and speaker who, after Gouverneur Morris, made the greatest number of speeches at the Constitutional Convention. Wilson went on to become a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. But he unwisely speculated in land and died disgraced in 1798, while fleeing from his creditors after the real estate bubble burst. Aaron Burr lives on in our national memory, but we take no pride in him.

So the Muse of History is fickle in her favors. John Hancock, who was an early advocate of American independence and later governor of Massachusetts, is remembered primarily because of his flashy signature. The man who signed the Declaration of Independence immediately after him, Josiah Bartlett of New Hampshire, achieved a strange sort of fame over two centuries later, when his name was used for a fictional president of the United States in the TV series, The West Wing. But the screenwriters spelled “Bartlet” with only one “t.”

Professor Dreisbach concludes that we are very much the poorer for our neglect of so many of our founders. He writes: “The demands of honest scholarship require scholars to give attention to the thoughts, words and deeds of not only a few selected demigods but also an expansive company of men and women who contributed to the founding of the American republic.”

Given the fact that so many of the issues that the founders wrestled with –- such as the checks and balances between our three branches of government, state-federal relations, the separation of church and state, and the nature and extent of individual rights –- are still very much with us, a better understanding of our past may help us to make wiser policy decisions today.

In my last post, I talked about some of our forgotten Founding Fathers. Our founding mothers, of course, have fared even worse. Women had no votes in early America. Indeed, they had hardly any rights at all. But there were some women who nevertheless managed to make their voices heard on the great issues of the day.

Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814), to take one example, was considered one of the most literate American women of the 18th Century. A popular author with a sharp wit and pen to match, she wrote poems, plays and satires. She is also believed to have written contributions to newspapers under the pseudonym, “A Columbian Patriot.”

Mrs. Warren was famous in her day, but if we think of founding mothers at all in 21st Century America, we are most likely to think of Abigail Adams, wife of our second president, John Adams, and mother of our sixth president, John Quincy Adams.

John Adams’ obligations as a legislator and a diplomat kept him away from home for long periods, so the couple stayed in touch through a steady stream of correspondence. Their letters are a national treasure. They feature as a plot device in the musical, 1776, and were the basis of a successful stage play called John and Abigail by William Gibson.

Abigail may not have been as well educated as her friend Mercy Warren, but she more than held up her end of the correspondence with her famous husband. Consider the spirited letter she wrote to John in Philadelphia, a few months before the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

“I long to hear that you have declared an Independency,” she enthused. “And by the way in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.”

All American women secured the right to vote with the passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution in 1920. After reading Abigail Adams’ letter, we can only wonder why it took that long.