The Making of a President

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

Believe it or not, the Republican debates are a hot ticket on TV. Last month’s debate on Fox in Florida attracted 6.1 million viewers. That’s nearly double the numbers posted four years before in September 2007. In that debate in New Hampshire, the contenders were Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul, Rudy Giuliani and John McCain. At the time McCain was given next to no chance to win the nomination.

The GOP debate on Oct. 11 was on Bloomberg TV, a small cable network. Nonetheless a media study reported  a sharp jump in the ratings as soon as the argument got underway.

How to account for the growing popularity of presidential debates?  Cable news executives can’t say for sure but their hunch – no surprise – is the economy and unhappiness with the political system. Think Occupy Wall Street.

After last week’s debate, Rick Perry, who performed poorly,  put a bewildering spin on American history. When a reporter asked him a question about states’ rights, the governor replied: “Our Founding Fathers never meant for Washington D.C. to be the fount of all wisdom. As a matter of fact they were very much afraid of that because they’d  just had this experience with this far-away government that had centralized thought process and planning and what have you, and then it was actually the reason that we fought the Revolution in the 16th century was to get away from that kind of onerous crown, if you will.”

Before Tuesday night’s debate in Las Vegas, Herman Cain, the former pizza executive and motivational speaker has been up there with Mitt Romney in the  polls. He’s admitted in an interview with David Gregory on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the hallmark of his economic plan, 9-9-9, would in fact raise taxes for many poor and middle-class families.

But although experts pointed out those people “pay little to no taxes under the current tax structure and would now pay both income and additional sales taxes under the plan,” Cain insisted in Los Vegas that the plan was sound, but misunderstood. Not one of the others criticized the part that would lower taxes for the affluent.

In that “Meet the Press” interview, he said he was only joking about killing people trying to  cross the border from Mexico with an electrified fence. “That’s not a serious plan,” he told David Gregory. “I’ve always said America needs to get a sense of humor.”

The subject was raised by the moderator Tuesday but the topic was overshadowed by the chorus of ridicule focused on 9-9-9.

The most incendiary clash of the night was, predictably, between Perry

who has been faltering of late and Mitt Romney, the presumed front-runner. It remains to be seen whether this was a do-or-die moment for the Texas governor. But Romney got in the last word when he warned Perry, who kept challenging his every word, “Governor, if you’re going to be president of the United States you’ve got to listen to people.” The audience roared approval.

Just before the Republican candidates gathered in Las Vegas for their eighth debate on CNN,  a poll found that  two-thirds of Republican voters have yet to make up their minds about whom the party should nominate to challenge President Obama.

Las Vegas was a brawl. Who won? Maybe Romney, but it’s still too early in the game. The next disputation is in November.

So lighten up and enjoy the show.

Mel Lavine was a television producer for many years with NBC News and CBS News in New York. Contact him at his e-mail address: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Thoughts While Shaving

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

FDR’s was one of the great voices on radio. Credit, too, his skill as an actor. (He once told Orson Welles that he and Welles were the best actors in America.) In his “Fireside Chats” he explained complex issues in everyday language as one would chat with a neighbor across the backyard fence. On almost any night when I was a kid and he was on the air, you could walk the quarter mile of Beals Street and not miss a beat.

In contrast to today’s angry mood toward Washington, it seems the majority of Americans during the Great Depression were less cynical about government than they are today – and yet the country in the 1930s was in much worse shape. A reason was advanced in a little book I just came across. Called “Dear FDR,” it was written by Leila A. Sussmann and published in 1963. It is an analysis, in part, of how Roosevelt made use of his mail which came in day after day by the thousands for years, some of it critical, even abusive, but in the great majority of cases most favorable, even affectionate.

The man in the street believed that the man in the White House was their friend and champion. In their outlook, Roosevelt battled the rich and powerful for the welfare and security of the ordinary person. Reviled by the great industrialists and bankers, Franklin Roosevelt rejoiced in their hatred. John Q. Citizen admired the president’s chutzpah.

Of course, even then the polls gave a more accurate picture of opinion than the mail ever did. But as Louis Howe, FDR’s closest adviser, pointed out after FDR moved into the White House:

“When letters are received from the small merchant or the country storekeeper or the workman in a city factory, or the farmer...they are always read carefully.” When they shed light on a problem with a New Deal program, “the whole letter or at least a summary reaches the president’s desk.”

In searching for solutions, Howe maintained that Roosevelt “attaches chief importance, not to what the experts think is good for the man but what the man himself feels he needs most to help him out of his troubles.”

How much of this was window dressing  one can’t say. But the man in the street trusted Roosevelt and elected him president four times.

*  *  *

A journalist friend recently returned from Europe says that if you are caught speeding in a luxury car in Finland the ticket could cost you a lot more than $100,000.

“That’s because,” Henrik Krogius writes in the Brooklyn Heights Press and Cobble Hill News in New York, a paper he edits, “in Finland  traffic fines are graded according to income.”

“Where a $100 fine could cause pain to someone trying to make ends meet, it would be pocket change to a multimillionaire. As Finland sees it, the offense should cause a somewhat comparable level of pain all along the line.”

And he adds: “Such an idea would of course be unthinkable to Republicans in the U.S.” As an example, he cites the refusal of  Republicans “even to eliminate tax breaks on corporate jets.”

Mel Lavine was a television producer for many years with NBC News and CBS News in New York. Contact him at his e-mail address: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

A Day Fit for a President

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

Some of our friends fancy sailing on cruise ships. Over time we contracted a case of cruise ship envy. Luckily, a ship was at hand, in Jack London Square. (Full disclosure, a noble friend, perhaps taking pity, made us a present of a couple of tickets ($80 apiece,  box lunch included) aboard the U.S.S. Potomac, Franklin Roosevelt’s famous yacht.

For Roosevelt, during the Depression and World War II, cruising down the Potomac into the sea  was the perfect escape from the heat of Washington and the telephone. He loved the water – an exuberant and skilled sailor since childhood. His notion of paradise was “sitting on the deck in an old hat shading his head from the sun, a fishing rod in his hands,” as Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote in “No Ordinary Time.”

Our destination aboard the president’s yacht last week was Angel Island, the largest island in San Francisco Bay. It was a day fit for a chief of state. The water was smooth, the sun strong, fanned by a welcome sea breeze.

Angel Island figures prominently in the history of California. For thirty years – from 1910 to 1940 – Angel was the major entry point for  perhaps  100,000 Asians and others from Pacific lands. Some refer to it as the West Coast’s Ellis Island. But that’s a wild stretch.

Ellis Island  in New York Bay, was the principal immigration center in the U.S. from 1892 to 1943. Its history is gilded as a haven for 17 million, mostly European immigrants. Angel Island’s story is not so pretty.

Many of the immigrants – mostly Chinese – were not welcome. Exclusion laws kept them and other Asians penned up in overcrowded and filthy barracks until their cases were decided. Most gained entry into the U.S. but others were turned away and sent back to the poverty and disorder from which they’d  fled.

Some of the immigrants held captive put their rage in words carved on the barrack walls. One translated “poem” says, in part:

“Detained in this wooden house for

several tens of days

because of the exclusion laws.

It’s a pity heroes have no place

To exercise their prowess.”

Angel Island was also where detained civilians were held during World War I and World War II. It was also where prisoners of war were confined in World War II. During the Cold War, the island was the site of a Nike missile base. But today its 740 acres are a beautiful state park. I must add the views on the trip over and on the return aboard the Potomac – seascapes of San Francisco and the Marin hills are astonishing. The same goes for the sail under the new Bay Bridge under construction.

Who needs a cruise to the Riviera when you have it as good in your own backyard?

Mel Lavine was a television producer for many years with NBC News and CBS News in New York. Contact him at his e-mail address: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Welcome to the Neighborhood

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

On my recent trip back East. friends wanted to see the house where I grew up in Brookline, a Boston suburb. I could hardly blame them. I’d regaled people for years about the fact that I grew up in the house next door to where John Kennedy was born, although not a the same time.

Kennedy was born at 83 Beals Street in 1917. I didn’t come into the world for another ten years. By the time my family moved to 85 Beals Street the Kennedys had long since gone to New York, Palm Beach and other exotic locations.

In my day, working and middle class people made up the neighborhood. Houses were single with some duplexes. Today most of the houses are divided up into apartments.

The Kennedy house has been a national historic site run by the government since 1967 when the president’s mother restored the comfortable single-family to the way it was when her son was growing up. One of the postcards for sale at the site shows a bit of the house next door – my house at 85; in particular a second floor window where I had my room.

I recognized very little of the old neighborhood when our friend who lives in nearby Andover drove us to Brookline. For all I could recognize at first I might have been looking at the far side of the moon.

“This is impossible,” I said. “I don’t remember anything.”

“Keep your eyes peeled,” said Kathy, a professor of history, who was driving. “It’ll come back to you. You’ll spot something.”

At length I spotted the old synagogue on Harvard Street; Edward Devotion, my old grammar school; and the movie theatre at Coolidge Corner where the price of a Saturday thriller was fifteen cents. And we found Beals Street, and number 85, upstairs,  as it was when I lived there.

“Should we knock?” we asked ourselves. “Ask for a look around?” We took a moment to think about it, then shrugged. To be honest, number 85  didn’t look terribly inviting. Not hostile but unkempt.

Next door at 83 a couple were sitting on the front porch. Probably people from the national parks. The Kennedy house looked good. But so did other houses on the street.

I was ready to move on. But Kathy wanted her pictures. And so the Lady Friend and I obliged as she directed us at angles where she could get the Kennedy house and my second floor window in the same shots. Meantime a  woman who lived in the neighborhood was walking rapidly towards us.

“You’ve got the wrong house,” she shouted. “The one you want is right there, number 83. That’s the house where President Kennedy was born.”

“We know all that,” Kathy waved. “But we have the right house.” And pointing to me said, “Number 85 is where this gentleman grew up.”

The woman clapped. “Oh, how nice. How wonderful. Welcome to the neighborhood!”

This column originally appeared on October 29, 2009. Mel Lavine was a television producer for many years with NBC News and CBS News in New York. Contact him at his e-mail address: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Waiting for Superman

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

When I was a kid, one of the nicest things you could say about someone was that he (it was always a “he” in those days) was smart enough to be  president. In school we were told that in America anyone could aspire to the presidency. If he worked hard, lived by the rules and wanted it badly enough — with luck — it just could happen. But after World War II, I heard professors argue that the presidency was no longer a job for the ordinary citizen. The world was too dangerous and  complicated. Only a superman could save us. Could be, but he has yet to land on the planet and reveal himself.. And so, like it or not, we are still stuck with ordinary mortals.

* * *

One day in the presidential election year of 1980, I remember watching Ronald Reagan on a TV monitor in the CBS newsroom. He was riding a handsome horse at an ambling gait along a trail at his ranch in Santa Barbara.  My boss, a worldly-wise journalist, was also drawn to the picture. “Why,” he wondered, would a fellow give up all  that peace and beauty for the White House and all the grief and stress that go with it?”

At the time I couldn’t take him seriously. Why for fame and immortality, I said, or something close to that.

My boss, who was then a man approaching seventy, scoffed.

Now that I am old myself his scoffing rings truer.

* * *

Somewhere I read of a president complaining that for all the majesty of the office, he can issue a command but it’s no guarantee it will be obeyed. Sometimes the order is poorly executed, or screwed up. Sometimes nothing happens.

* * *

President Obama’s scrappy new stand  to bring the country’s rising debt under control and vowing no Medicare cuts without tax increases for the  rich and powerful corporations is heartening news for the liberal/progressive wing of his party. “This time,” rejoiced the New York Times, the president “did not compromise with himself beforehand, or put out a half measure in hopes of luring nonexistent Republican support.” Still the Times complained about a lack of specifics “and his aides’ inexplicable continued faith in the idea of Congress working out a sensible middle ground on taxes.”

David Brooks, the rightward commentator on the Times and on PBS, characterized the Obama move on Monday as showmanship, a preview of his re-election campaign.

He asserts “that this package (from the president) has nothing to do with helping people right away or averting a double dip. This is a campaign marker, not a jobs bill.”

And so it may be. On the other hand, it is hard to take critics like Brooks seriously as long as Republicans are unwilling to compromise with Obama, unless it’s on their own terms.

The headline is that at last Obama is on the offensive. And a lot of Democrats, with fingers crossed, are saying they hope it’s true.

Mel Lavine was a television producer for many years with NBC News and CBS News in New York. Contact him at his e-mail address: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

All About Fear

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

In 1964, when I was a graduate student in journalism at Columbia University, I interviewed James A. Farley. He had been Franklin Roosevelt’s campaign manager and postmaster general in the 1930s. (“As Maine Goes so Goes Vermont,” he told the press on November 4, 1936, after correctly predicting that Roosevelt would carry 46 of the 48 states then in the union in that presidential election.)

The paper I was writing was on TV and politics. I’d called on the seventy-six-year-old Farley to help me understand how TV, the new electronic media, had re-shaped political campaigns since his time when most people got their news from print and radio. Perhaps, I thought, the old pol would have insights about the new electronic medium.

I wanted to know if he agreed with the conventional wisdom that TV had  changed the rules of the game?

To my surprise, he said no, not really, and not fundamentally. The same old rules applied. Citing the Roosevelt landslides in the depression years of the 1930s, he said people voted their fears, and always have. When people vote they vote against someone or some thing they fear. Technology aside, the principle still held.

After 1932, Democrats held power for a generation running against Herbert Hoover. Republicans have done as well running against socialism. And so on.

The conversation with Farley came to mind when I watched the Republicans debate on Monday. It was all about fear.

Gov. Rick Perry of Texas had scared the Republican elite with his assault on Social Security by calling it a Ponzi scheme. Consequently, the party elders, the New York Times reports, are beginning to coalesce around Perry’s principal rival, Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, though in this debate, Perry seemed to back away from the allegation.

Perry pledged that the people who are on Social Security have nothing to fear. The program would stay in place for them.

Former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, who dropped out of the contest after a poor showing in the Iowa straw vote, is now backing Romney. The move is seen as a “signal in the battle for the party’s soul” between traditional party leaders and grass-roots, Tea Party conservatives, according to the Times.

The G.O.P. peerage remembers that George W. Bush made a move to privatize Social Security but dropped the subject when the country rose up in fury.

Just as old Jim Farley said, people are moved by their fears.

Mel Lavine was a television producer for many years with NBC News and CBS News in New York. Contact him at his e-mail address: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

More Truman than Harvard

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

As he prepares for his address to Congress and the nation on Thursday President Obama can take his cue from an Op-Ed piece by Robert Reich, labor secretary under Bill Clinton and a UC Berkeley professor. In Sunday’s New York Times, Reich cites research from Moody’s Analytics which reports that “the highest incomes now account for 37 percent of all consumer purchases.” In other words, American society is becoming more unequal, less democratic, and more plutocratic.

Thus, Reich says, “Reviving the middle class  requires that we reverse the generations’ decades-long trend toward widening inequality.” He believes that this is possible notwithstanding “the political power of the executive class.”

“So many people,” he points out, “are now being hit by job losses, sagging income, and declining home values that Americans could be mobilized.”

“Mobilized” – that’s the word that leapt off the page for me: a moment to be seized and a teetering middle class to be rescued.

Let the Republicans be the Party of No. They have made no secret of their goal to make Obama a one-term president. Obama, however, still owns the bully pulpit, if only he would use it. Instead of citing Ronald Reagan as he has been prone to do, he would be better served by Harry Truman. Truman campaigned against a Republican “Do Nothing Congress” and to the country’s astonishment won.

Obama’s poll numbers may be dropping but Truman’s were virtually an asterisk. His spunk and persistence carried the day. The Democratic party was split  three ways in 1948  –  on  the ultra left led by Henry Wallace and on the far right by segregationist Strom Thurmond. Truman occupied the liberal New Deal middle.  It did no harm that the unexciting Republicans candidate, Thomas Dewey, the governor of New York, reminded  people of the man on the wedding cake.

“Give ‘em hell, Harry!” people cheered when Truman addressed crowds from the rear of his campaign train. Republicans complained that he didn’t campaign on the issues, just gave their party hell. Truman  is supposed to have replied, “I  give people the facts and the Republicans just think it’s hell.” The story may be apocryphal  but I like it anyway.

One hopes that on Thursday the president will assert himself boldly and capture the imagination with a program for jobs and economic recovery to help the middle class get back on its feet. If not now, when? If not the president, who?

In 1961 when John Kennedy was sworn in as president, it is said Robert Frost advised the new president to be more Irish than Harvard. In a somewhat different vein, may the president today be advised to be more Truman than Harvard.

Mel Lavine was a television producer for many years with NBC News and CBS News in New York. Contact him at his e-mail address: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

GUEST COMMENTARY

By Cindy M. Cathey

Superintendent of Schools

It is with great enthusiasm that I personally welcome each of you to the 2011-2012 school year! During the summer break we were busy preparing for the opening of school and looking forward to another year of success for the children of our community.

Our focus this year will be to strengthen our partnerships with our families, community, local businesses, foundations, and our city. Working together we can transform our schools into outstanding centers of learning that we all want them to be.

Such a transformation will not happen overnight, but I am confident that we can work together to ensure that our programs and support systems meet the diverse needs of all of our students. I am committed to seeing that our children thrive in our schools.

•  •  •  •

Last year we implemented many new initiatives, which we will continue to strengthen throughout this year. Persistence on our part will no doubt yield impressive learning outcomes for our students. We purchased new materials, provided extensive training, altered schedules and course offerings, and worked with teams of teachers to identify essential standards so that all students have access to rigorous curriculum.

While our test scores are hot off the press as I write this annual letter, I can see that in some cases the data shows promise, but in other cases the scores fell short of our goals.  Rather than feel discouraged, we must rise to the challenge facing us and closely examine our successes and our challenges and adjust accordingly.

We must work together as a community to ensure our students receive a world class education. In the next weeks, we will be analyzing last year’s state assessments so that we can further tailor our plans for our children’s success.

•  •  •  •

Our accomplishments over the summer related to Measure B projects give us much to proudly celebrate.  A few of these accomplishments are:

• Painting and lighting systems in all classrooms at:  Wilson, Roosevelt, Bancroft, and San Leandro High School.

• Completion of restroom modernization at Bancroft, Muir, Roosevelt and Wilson Schools.

• New classrooms at Lincoln Alternative High School to allow for a new education program designed to serve our most needy seventh through twelfth grade students.

• Continued modernization at the Career Technical Education Center at SLHS.

• Modernization of our Adult School to add a new nursing program.

Measure M bond projects took off this summer with the approval by the board of the Pacific Sports Complex and Burrell Field conceptual design. The conceptual design for the SLHS swim center and field work will be presented to the board at their regular meeting on Sept. 7. Preparation for these two marquee projects is well underway and timelines remain on schedule.

•  •  •  •

While the budget crisis in California and the nation continues to plague school districts, the school board made tough decisions to use funds to restore some crucial programs for the 2011-2012 school year only. Staff positions and services restored include: maintaining K-3 class size at 28 to 1 and restoration of middle school counselors; elementary librarian assistants, a campus supervisor, middle and elementary school vice principals, and two furlough days, to name a few. This helps us get through this year and gives us time to prepare for the inevitable cuts that are unfortunately slated to come next year.

•  •  •  •

I am proud to be your Superintendent and look forward to a fantastic school year! I invite the community to visit our schools. I promise that you will be impressed with what you see.

It’s Tough to be a Fan These Days

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

A fellow came up to me this week with a word of congratulations after watching the A’s and the Red Sox battling in Boston. Despite lengthy rain delays, a large number of fans waited out their beloved Red Sox. “Amazing loyalty, simply amazing,” said the approving A’s fan. (The Red  Sox won the game  at a very late New England hour.)

His remark was welcome after the mayhem involving Raiders and 49ers fans on August 20 at their preseason game. One man was badly injured in a beating in a Candlestick Park restroom and two men were wounded by gunfire in the parking lot after the game.

In recent memory, too,  is the attack outside Dodger stadium in Los Angeles after the March 31 season opener. Bryan Stow, 42, of Santa Cruz, a Giants fan, was walking from the game with friends when two men wearing Dodgers clothing approached him from behind. According to reports, the two first taunted Stow, who was wearing Giants paraphernalia, and then hit him from behind, causing him to fall to the ground. Then they kicked him where he lay before fleeing in a car.

The last I heard, Stow, the father of two and a paramedic, remains hospitalized in San Francisco in serious condition with brain injury. Two men charged in the beating have pleaded not guilty. A preliminary hearing was set for September 30.

In a study of dysfunctional sport fans published in the Journal of Leisure Research in 2006, I read that the characteristics associated with unruly behavior  draws “a picture of a less educated, lower income, younger, single, with no children at home, male who spends an inordinate amount of his time consuming sports media and, presumably, beer.” The profile indicates that “these individuals may lack other meaningful connections or relationships that provide direction and that promote self-control.”

The study suggests that “sport organizations might consider the practice of educating fans to place cell phone calls to security when abusive people disrupt the enjoyment of the game,” a  practice, it points out, followed by the Boston Red Sox.

Perhaps other teams are taking it up as well.

I had a close call myself – or thought I did – when I was living in New York. One night I took in a Red Sox-Yankee game at Yankee Stadium. Of course I wore my Red Sox cap. About the second or third inning I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned, confronted by a pair of burly fellows. Pointing a thick finger in my face, one of them said, “You’re in Yankee Stadium. We don’t want to hear folks rooting for Boston. Got it?”

Tipping the scale at around 170 pounds, I said, “It would take a bigger man than you.”  The words just tumbled out, and could not be recalled.

The worst, I imagined, the unspeakable worst would follow. But nothing untoward occurred. Nothing.

As I look back I can only surmise that these guys were as shocked as I was at my retort.

Mel Lavine was a television producer for many years with NBC News and CBS News in New York. Contact him at his e-mail address: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

No Small Talk

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

When I was a student at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, I once shared a cab with George A. Barrett, a star reporter for the New York Times. He’d had many adventures over a long and distinguished career.

Anxious to take advantage of the chance encounter, I asked Barrett if he could cite the most memorable of all his assignments. Without a moment’s hesitation he said the two days he spent with William Faulkner, the American novelist and short story writer and Nobel laureate.

Surprised, for I had expected something on the order of wars, assassinations, revolutions and the like, I said, “You’re kidding?”

He shook his head. “No small talk,” he said.

My late, good friend, Kirk Rowlands, of Berkeley, was not a famous writer but, he, too, was not given to small talk. What drew me to him was his passion for history in general and the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt in particular. His library was filled with works on foreign affairs, U.S. history and presidential politics.  Nearly 800 volumes were about FDR.

At first, this struck me as an anomaly. For 30 years, he worked on budgets and administration for the University of California under five presidents and another 30 years as a financial adviser. With that background, one could be forgiven for taking Kirk for a moderate Democrat or Republican. In fact, he was an unreconstructed New Dealer until the day he died on July 9 at 92. FDR was his hero.

Kirk, who began life on a farm in Washington State, was a teenager during the darkest days of the Depression. Because of Roosevelt’s New Deal, he was able to find work and scrape together enough money to attend Washington State University. (Later he would study at the University of Washington and the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration.)

He remained a Democrat because he never forgot what life was like under the Republicans who believed the acceptance of federal money undermined a man’s self-respect. He was more in tune with the New Deal philosophy as paraphrased by Frederick Lewis Allen in his book about the 1930s, “Since Yesterday:” The millions who are out of work “are not to be considered paupers. They are not to be subjected to any humiliation which we can spare them. They are to be regarded as citizens and friends who are the temporary victims of an unfortunate economic situation for which the nation as a whole is responsible…”

I sometimes wondered what people thought of Kirk and me in restaurants where we met for conversation, no small talk: two old fellows discussing personalities and issues from the present back to a long ago when giants walked the earth.

Mel Lavine was a television producer for many years with NBC News and CBS News in New York. Contact him at his e-mail address: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Neighbors Need Each Other

Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

It was one of those dog days. I wanted a holiday from politics. In fact I wanted a holiday from the news.

I fussed to the Lady Friend, “So what’ll I write about?”

“Tell them what happened while I was away in the Midwest visiting family.”

Simply told I was hit by plugged-up sinuses, swollen, watery eyes, and most alarmingly, vertigo, while the Lady Friend was gallivanting halfway across the nation, although, I concede, in furnace temperatures.

But I knew what to do.

I picked up the phone and called a next door neighbor. She had a key and was here in a moment.

Then she was off to the pharmacy, and found over-the-counter allergy tablets. They worked. After awhile the dizziness went away. Nonetheless, she insisted on driving me to the doctor who, after an examination, confirmed allergies to be the culprit.

When the same neighbor is traveling as she often is in her job, the Lady Friend and I look after her house, take in her mail and the newspapers, and feed the cat.

“Neighbors need each other,” said the Lady Friend.

She recalled a night a couple of years ago when the kitchen alarm in the house on the other side from us was ringing. She knew the couple were working late in their studio apartment separate from the house and unlikely to hear it.

The Lady Friend jumped out of bed, ran down the driveway in her bare feet, and rapped on the studio window. The  neighbors came outside, heard the alarm, and tore upstairs. They got the pot off the stove in the nick of time.

The same neighbors have offered us the use of their truck when we need to take a load to the dump or convey something big.

A young couple in a house on the corner are sometimes in need of a baby sitter. The Lady Friend steps in. Every so often a pie or loaf of bread or fruit is at our door from their oven or garden.

We all have keys to each others’ houses. And we even alert the bookkeeper in the  dentist’s office when it’s time for her to move her car and avoid a fine on the day the street sweepers come through.

Maybe not a headline but good neighbors help to make a good life.

Mel Lavine was a television producer for many years with NBC News and CBS News in New York. Contact him at his e-mail address: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

What’s the Matter with Obama?

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

People are asking, what’s the matter with President Obama? Where’s the fight? The passion? Or as Drew Westen, a professor of psychology at Emory University, put it in a lead Op/Ed piece in Sunday’s New York Times, “What happened to Obama?” In sum, where’s the beef?

On the day of Obama’s inauguration, Westen writes, he had a sinking feeling. “People were scared and angry. The economy was spinning in reverse.” Yet Obama failed to step up to the challenge and make the most of an historic moment. For instance, writes Westen, he should “have made clear that the problem wasn’t tax-and-spend liberalism or the deficit.” In fact, a deficit didn’t exist “until George W. Bush gave nearly $2 trillion in tax breaks largely to the wealthiest Americans and squandered 1 trillion in two wars.”

Obama also might have framed a “compelling” argument to counter the reactionary voices on the right. He might have  asserted that the fault in our economy is “not due to spending on things like the pensions on firefighters” but to a system that is dominated by people “who can afford to buy influence” and re-write the rules “so they can cut themselves progressively larger slices of the American pie while paying less of their fair share of it.”

But Obama made no such speech, says the professor, and an opportunity was lost. In the two and a half years since he has been too eager to compromise, and “takes both sides of every issue.” What’s more, “instead of indicting the people whose recklessness wrecked the economy, he put them in charge of it.”

As do many commentators in these hard times, he cites Franklin D. Roosevelt as an example of courageous leadership. “In similar circumstances,” Westen maintains, Roosevelt  “offered Americans a promise to use the power of his office to make their lives better and to keep trying until he got it right.”

As anyone familiar with this column knows, I am an  FDR fan, but I think the professor lost sight of the differences in biography. FDR was perhaps the most qualified person in history to be president. He was a state legislator, the assistant secretary of the navy during World War I, a vice presidential candidate in 1920, a governor of New York, the most populous state in the country, for two terms, half of that time during  the Depression, before he was elected president. He was the scion of a distinguished American family, well-to-do, widely traveled and conversant with  world leaders and leading American politicians before ever running for the White House.

By contrast  Obama has one of the slimmest of resumes, an unremarkable state legislator in Illinois and a U.S. senator, with no notable legislation bearing his name. He was a law professor but without great distinction. He was a community organizer but he never ran a city, or a state, or a  business. Yet his resume is broader than Lincoln’s, our greatest president. Lincoln served a short time in the Illinois legislature and was  elected to Congress but lasted only one term.

What is not computed in the professor’s essay is the elephant in the room, the question of race. Judging by the din from the radical right, the bugaboo that has stalked American history since the first slave ship came ashore in the New World is alive and well. The first African American president in history has trials neither Lincoln nor Roosevelt could ever have contemplated.

Mel Lavine was a television producer for many years with NBC News and CBS News in New York. Contact him at his e-mail address: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .