God Save the Queen!

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

These are anxious times about jobs, pensions, budget cuts, and moves on the Republican right to abort the New Deal and the Great Society, so why the fascination for the Royal Wedding over here?

A few weeks ago the Lady Friend was an innocent. She had to ask what all the talk of Kate and Williams was about? She first thought it might be a new TV show. As she soon learned, she was not wrong.

Come Friday, April 29, Prince William Arthur Philip Louis of Wales, second in line to the British throne, and his girlfriend, Catherine Elizabeth Middleton, will be married in Westminster Abbey with all the royal trappings. And the whole world will be watching, not to mention many Brits who have just been notified of the loss of their jobs, or lower welfare payments, or social services.

April in Britain is the start of the financial year, a particularly painful passage for the working class and the poor this time around. As Jonathan Freedland, a noted British journalist, pointed out in the New York Review of Books, this is the period when “many of the Conservative-led government’s most stringent deficit-cutting measures begin to bite.”

No tumbrels — carts like the ones used during the French Revolution — in sight, he said, but look again “at the buttons by those British leftists who are refusing to celebrate the upcoming marriage. Its slogan, tucked below an image of a small crown: ‘Stuff the wedding, fight the cuts!’”

Most Brits may accept Thomas Paine’s judgment that the notion of an hereditary ruler makes as much sense as an “hereditary mathematician, or an hereditary wise man.” Factor in the English public’s long disillusionment with Prince Charles, next in line to the throne, and dismay over the scandalous behavior of his and the Queen’s son, Prince Andrew. As Freedland puts it, Andrew “has been in the newspapers for all of the wrong reasons.” The churlish Charles was his churlish self on the day the engagement of his son was announced. When asked for his reaction by a TV reporter, he murmured before turning away, “Well, they’ve been practicing long enough.”

And yet, according to Freedland, “the royal family’s appeal remains resilient.” He finds that, in spite of everything, the present-day good will  enjoyed by the royal family is in part due to the great success of “The King’s Speech,” a movie masterpiece about George VI, the Queen’s father, in the days leading to World War II. Another is that the wedding is happening a year before the country celebrates the diamond jubilee of Elizabeth’s sixty-year reign, a period exceeded only by Queen Victoria.

Perhaps another reason, which the Lady Friend propounded, is that people are raised on fairy tales which may help explain our own fascination with royalty.

Elizabeth, who was 85 on April 21, was around when Britain led by Churchill stood alone in the island’s “finest hour” against the Hitler Blitz. You can’t dismiss history like that. God Save the Queen!

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 .

Travels With Charley

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

John Steinbeck, the great American writer, died in 1968 at 66. You know his books – “The Grapes of Wrath,” “East of Eden,” “The Red Pony,” “The Wayward Bus,” “Tortilla Flat,” “Cannery Row,” “Of Mice and Men,” and “Travels with Charley,” among others.

“Travels with Charley” was published in the early 1960s and is still read today. Steinbeck was closing in on 60 (old age for many back then) when he set out “In Search of America” as the subtitle has it, accompanied only by a French poodle named Charley. Together they traveled through some 40 states – had many adventures – some scary like a hurricane in New York; some fraternal like sharing cognac with a family of potato pickers in Maine; some humorous, some stirring, some angry about what he found in the America of the time, and some prideful.

So I was shocked when I read an editorial in the New York Times that said a reporter retracing Steinbeck’s steps discovered that the author’s account of three months of solitary travels was fiction in many instances. The book, said the Times, was “full of improbably colorful characters” and improbable dialogue. All I could think was: another giant of my youth brought down to earth!

The reporter, Bill Seigerwald, (not a Times employee) retraced Steinbeck’s 1960 coast to coast trip. He said in a blog and in an article this month in Reason, a magazine, that Steinbeck fudged the facts, dates and places. He had not been gone for months with only the poodle for companionship, as he claimed. The author’s wife was with him most of the time; he hardly ever camped; often stayed in fancy hotels.

Why then do I not feel short-changed? Why am I not moved to cast old John aside as another charlatans in the trade?

Maybe because “Travels With Charley” is an historical document of a Twentieth Century odyssey, if made up in parts. Maybe it’s because when he was preparing his Great Depression novel, “The Grapes of Wrath,” (a primer for our own Great Recession), Steinbeck was inspired to put, in his words, “a tag of shame” on the greedy, despicable people who brought the country to its knees. Maybe, too, it’s for lines in “Cannery Row” like, “Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.” Maybe, too, it’s for dialogue like, “Okie use’ ta mean you was from Oklahoma. Now it means you’re  scum. Don’t mean nothing itself; it’ the way they say it.” Or, “Owning freezes you forever into ‘I,’ and cuts yourself off forever from the ‘we.’”

The Times is right when it asserts, “Books labeled ‘nonfiction’ should not break faith with readers. Not now, and not in 1962, the year ‘Travels With Charley,’ came out and Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for Literature.”

And yet I bear Steinbeck no blame. “Travels With Charley” paints a true  picture of what our country was like half a century ago. No dearth of reality about that.

I am in agreement with the man who wrote the Times, “Your April 10 editorial. “The Truth About Charley” frets that John Steinbeck lied in portions of his book, “Travels With Charley in Search of America...

“What if he did? As Picasso said, ‘Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.’”

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 .

Is Liberalism Dead?

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

Is liberalism dead? One might think so after last week’s deal to avoid a government shutdown. President Obama left it to the Republicans to define  the role of government in  hard times. But, as Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times, even if $38 billion in spending cuts was the best of all possible deals, why did the president have to praise Congress for passing, “the largest annual spending cut in our history,” as Obama declared.

It was as if, said Krugman, “shortsighted budget cuts in the face of unemployment – cuts that will slow growth and increase unemployment – are actually a good idea?”

The dogma dominating Washington is cruel. The poor, he pointed out, must accept big cuts in Medicaid and food stamps; the middle class must accept big cuts in Medicare (actually a dismantling  of the whole program); and corporations and the rich must accept big cuts in the taxes have to pay. Shared sacrifice!”

It’s clear that no matter what the president does, the Republicans and the Tea Party have been out to wreck the Obama presidency since day one. And yet, as of this writing, the president persists in projecting an image of conciliation and compromise, as if he is above the fray, too proud to fight.

It may be, as he and his strategists seem to believe, that the road to re-election is winning the independent vote. Maybe, but the president would be wise not to take his liberal base for granted. Many of those folks are uneasy, confused about who really is the brilliant young man they helped make president? They thought they knew – he’d made it so poetically clear in ’08 – but they are uncertain now.

The presidential historian Robert Dallek has described Obama’s unenviable situation:

“How does he define himself against this wave of conservative rhetoric and ideology? It’s hard for him to say I’m an old-fashioned New Deal, Great Society liberal. He can’t say that and expect to win re-election. So you fudge. It’s like what they said about Roosevelt being a chameleon on plaid, changing coloration and shifting forms. But it’s much more difficult now because of the 24/7 news cycle.”

More difficult  but hardly out of the question.  Democrats are all the more hungry for leadership, and change that was promised. So a question. If the president is not going to stand up and fight for the things the country needs, could he find himself with company on the road to next year’s convention?

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 .

There’s More to Baseball than Baseball

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

The Lady Friend adopted a more enlightened view of my Boston Red Sox when Neil Diamond opened the 2010 season at Fenway singing his classic, “Sweet Caroline.”

“Why is he doing it?” she said of her idol. “He must be from Boston. Is he from Boston?” I didn’t know. Neil Diamond was not one of my idols.

“He must be from somewhere back there in Red Sox Nation,” she insisted.

She’d never seen such fans, young and old, in pants, shoes, socks, caps and T-shirts, and with tote bags, all emblazoned with the Red Sox trademark, when we took in a few exhibition games in Florida the year before.

“I can’t see their underwear but I assume that’s Red Sox, too,” she remarked in amazement. She’d never thought of baseball fans as groupies but spring training was an eye-opener.

It was the live presence of  Neil Diamond  on TV performing in Fenway Park that opening day that caused the Lady Friend to squeal like  a school girl. I won’t say that she became a Red Sox fan, only that there is reason to hope that my Midwestern Lady Friend will join me in Red Sox Nation.

After googling I could tell her that Diamond’s enduring hit is played at every Red Sox home game  before the bottom of the 8th  inning.

And that in an interview with the Associated Press on November 20, 2007, Diamond recalled that “Sweet Caroline” was inspired by a photo of  President Kennedy’s daughter when she was a little girl in her riding gear next to her pony. Some years later he wrote the song in 1969 in a Memphis hotel room in less than an hour. Above all, he got the chance to relate all that to Caroline herself when he performed “Sweet Caroline” for her via satellite at her 50th birthday party.

And, for good measure, I told  the native daughter of North Dakota that Neil Diamond was not from Boston but Brooklyn.

However, time is short. The Lady Friend has begun to sound like a Giants fan. So I croon:

“Where it began

I can’t begin to knowin’

But then I know it’s growin’ strong

“Was in the spring

And spring became the summer

Who’d ever believed you’d come along...”

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 .

Moments of Truth

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

It probably will not be compared to moments when Lyndon Johnson suffered a “credibility gap” between promise and performance  in the Vietnam War. Or when Richard Nixon denied any wrongdoing in Watergate. Nor was it anything like the outrage and frustration that contributed to Jimmy Carter’s defeat in 1980 when 52 Americans were held captive for more than a year in Iran.

But for Barack Obama it was a critical moment in his presidency when he made his case to wage a limited war in partnership with allies against Muammar el-Quaddafi, the Libyan dictator. Before his nationally televised address Obama‘s critics complained for more than a week that he’d not explained the plan and goal of the war. The move was all the more surprising since Obama ran for president and in part won election because of his outspoken opposition to the invasion of Iraq eight years ago.

(The morning after the speech, after praising Obama for delivering “a clear, compelling rationale for his decision to use military force to prevent mass slaughter in Libya,” the San Francisco Chronicle nonetheless noted “this mission retains an unsettlingly open-ended feel.”)

In his address the president ruled out overthrowing Qaddafi by force, but defended the air strikes on Qaddafi’s military and artillery to prevent atrocities in the rebel city of Benghazi. “I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action,” he said. In other words, sometimes a man has to go with his gut feelings. Given Qaddafi’s well-deserved image as one of the world’s Most Wanted, Obama may be given the benefit of the doubt.

Before the president spoke, he faced skeptics of all political stripes. Richard Haass, who worked in both Bush administrations and is now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, was quoted in the New York Times as saying, “It should not be assumed that a massacre or genocide was about to happen.” Qaddafi, he said, may have been seeking merely to intimidate potential foes. Nor is it clear that the Libyan rebels are more kindhearted and democratic and pro-American.

While Obama was speaking I was reminded of the years when I lived in New York and presidents Johnson, Nixon and Carter had their moments of truth. A neighbor and I used to compare notes. As I remember, in all three cases the presidents failed to measure up. But with Monday night’s forceful presentation Obama succeeded, at least in the short run. He bought himself time.

But he implied (as his secretary of defense had said outright) that Libya was not a vital interest of the United States. For starters, I submit, what is in our vital interest is the protection of ordinary Americans from being dispossessed by big business and Wall Street.

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 Native Son Looks Homeward

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

This column originally appeared on April 19, 2007.

As a native son, I always look homeward this time of the year when thousands of runners converge on Boston for the Marathon. The 26-mile, 385-yard race has never been postponed or canceled because of poor weather and this year’s day of wind and rain was no exception.

It falls on a local holiday, Patriot’s Day, which commemorates the Battles of Lexington and Concord (April 19, 1775). Those first skirmishes between British troops and American colonials marked the start of the War of Independence.

There was no school on Patriot’s Day. In the suburb of Brookline where I lived, someone always re-enacted the ride through town of William Dawes — not Paul Revere.

According to local legend, Dawes, a Brookline man, was the real guy who spread the alarm to the colonists to get ready for the redcoats. But Paul Revere gets all the credit. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow needed word to rhyme:

For example: “Listen, my children, and you shall hear/Of the midnight ride of William Dawes,/On the 18th of April, in Seventy-five;/Hardly a man is now alive/Who remembers that famous day and year...”

You see what I mean. A writer as classy as Longfellow would never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

In a prideful way, the Marathon touched my family. My Uncle Morris was one of the doctors hired to look after the runners. One day we spotted his picture on the front page of the Globe. He was grinning broadly, in company with Boston’s roguish mayor, James Michael Curley. For the rest of my childhood, Uncle Morris, alone among my relatives, walked with giants.

In high school, I remember Mr. Bates, the track coach, told us boys it took courage to be a long-distance runner. And, in the next breath, as if he knew my fantasy, he said directly to me, “You don’t have the courage.”

Nonetheless, my dream of running all 26.2 miles remained a fantasy. I sprinted, and once ran the mile in something like six and a half minutes. In time, sprinting gave way to jogging and, in more recent years, to walking.

A younger friend never gave up hope. He swam in the ocean, and biked and ran on mountain roads. After training for several years, he flew to Boston with his two young children. They would see what kind of stuff their father was made of. In fact, he ran the Marathon in pretty good time; as I remember it, well under four hours. (Robert K. Cheruiyot, of Kenya, who won Monday’s race, finished in 2 hours 14 minutes and 13 seconds, the slowest time in 30 years.) As my friend crossed the finish line, his kids ran to him. “Daddy, Daddy,” they said. “You should have seen the old man who came in a half hour before you. People said he was 85!”

I wonder. Is it ever too late?

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 .

The Passive Presidency

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

With re-election on his mind, President Obama has adopted a style he hopes will win him the votes of independents. Until the 2010 shellacking of Democrats he was gung-ho for the middle and working classes and the poor, curbing Wall Street’s greed, protecting the consumer, creating jobs, you name it. Now he is in retreat as the passive president.

Most recently he took a cue from Bill Clinton’s scrapbook. You may remember that our 42nd president promoted uniforms for schoolchildren when he needed to change the subject. Obama’s new deal is preventing bullying in schools. Toward this end he sponsored a White House meeting in the full glare of the cameras. Meantime a new Democratic senator from West Virginia, Joe Manchin III,  scolded the president for not leading the party in its budget battles with Republicans. After all, Obama  promised to change Washington, but that was then.

When Obama campaigned for president in 2008, he promised to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, if he was elected. But last week he issued an executive order affirming the legitimacy of  a system of indefinite detention. The president’s decision, according to the New York Times, “applies to 47 prisoners who cannot be tried because the evidence against them was classified or improperly obtained (usually through torture) but who cannot be freed because they are  considered a serious terrorist threat.”

The administration, said the newspaper,  has “chosen to accept the concept of indefinite detention without trial, which represents a stain on  American justice.”

Obama, who once denounced prisoner abuse, gave tacit approval to the mistreatment of Pfc. Bradley Manning, in prison nine months on charges of handing government files to WikiLeaks. Although Manning has not yet come to trial, the military reportedly has been treating him abusively in ways that recall how terror suspects were treated during the benighted presidency of George W. Bush.

As for the economy, we hear from Robert Reich, Clinton’s secretary of labor,  in Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle, that – yes – jobs are growing but too slowly “to make a real dent in unemployment.”

The reason is that millions of the jobless are no longer counted because they they’re out of the mix. “If the share of Americans who are either employed or seeking work was the same today as it was before the Great Recession,” Reich says, “the current unemployment rate would be 11.5 percent instead of 8.9 percent.”

But the real story – “most of the jobs we’ve gained pay less than the jobs we’ve lost.”

“The biggest losses during the Great Recession were jobs paying $19.05 to $31.40 an hour. By contrast the biggest gains over the past year have been jobs paying $9.03 to $12.91 an hour.”

As Reich says, the news isn’t the small growth in jobs. It’s the smaller paychecks.

On the other hand, I see in The Nation that Bank of America, which was rescued  by a taxpayer-financed loan of $45 billion in 2008, paid “$0.00 in taxes the next year. Up next other giants like Citigroup, Boeing, ExxonMobil, Wells Fargo and General Electric, which benefited from government largess but contribute not a cent to the public coffers.”

In the meantime, executives staggered off with bonuses in multiples of millions.

I hate to say this but waiting for President Obama to come to our rescue reminds me of a play, “Waiting for Godot.”

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 .

Today Me, Tomorrow You

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

I read a piece Sunday in the New York Times magazine by an Oregon driver who broke down three times this past year, but each time no one stopped to help. The break-downs occurred when he was driving other people’s cars. Otherwise, he said, if he’d been in his own car, he would have “carried things like a jack and extra fuses, and know enough not to park on a steep incline with less than a gallon of fuel.”

The people at the gas station where he’d asked  for a gas can told him that they couldn’t loan them out “for safety reasons” but that “I could buy a really crappy one-gallon can, with no cap, for $15.”

“It was enough,”  said Justin Horner, a graphic designer who lives in Portland, “to make me say stuff like ‘this country is going to hell in a hand basket,’ which I actually said.”

In the end, some people did stop. In all three instances they were Mexican immigrants. One family lived in Mexico but was in Oregon picking cherries for a few weeks, and then peaches, before returning home. The driver got out of his van. He did not speak any English but his daughter did. The man had a jack but it was too small for Horner’s jeep. So they braced it with a part of a big log they’d cut with the Mexican’s saw. As he was taking the wheel off, Horner said he broke his tire iron. It was one of those collapsible ones and I wasn’t careful...”  The wife took the tire iron from her husband and was off  to buy a new one. She returned in 15 minutes.

Horner tried to pay them but “the guy just smiled and, with what looked like great concentration, said in English, ‘Today you, tomorrow me.’”

The piece reminded the Lady Friend of a story I’d told her when my late wife and I were looking for a place to live in Mexico. The year was 1958. We had been staying in Chapala on a lake with the same name. But we found Chapala, a magnet for Americans, especially retired military officers, too rich for our means. Friends told us about Sayula over the mountains, not many miles away. Tourists were rare.

When our venerable Dodge came to rest in the plaza in Sayula we discovered that we had a flat rear tire. I was about to reach for the spare and begin cranking but a cheerful crowd of young men waved me off. They would change the tire. But a lug nut was missing from our wheel. What to do? After examining the attachments closely, one of the boys sprinted across the street to examine the wheel of a government jeep. He returned in triumph with a lug nut that was a perfect fit for our Dodge.

“But,” I said. “You might get yourself in trouble. You stole that nut from the government.”

“The government?” replied the youth. “We are the government!”

My wife and I often wondered if a car with people from Mexico had wound up in our own small Northern California town with a break down, would they have been as warmly helped? We thought not. But, as I say, this was 1958.

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 .

The Last Doughboy

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

The last World War I doughboy died Sunday at 110. He was Frank Buckles of Charles Town, W. Va. When the United States entered the war in April, 1917,  to make the world “safe for democracy,” Buckles was 16, spurred to enlist by recruiting posters. The marines turned him down. Too young and underweight. The Navy said no. Flat feet. He lied about his age, and the Army took him.

Like many young people, Buckles was fired by a desire to get to the front. Hearing that driving an ambulance was an almost sure ticket to see the war up close, he volunteered for the job. Although he wound up in France driving military vehicles and ambulances, he never got to see the real war, but he did see the affect of the war on the people.

In its obituary Tuesday, the New York Times cited a passage in a Buckles 2001 interview for the Veterans History Project of the Library of Congress.

“The little French children were hungry,” he recalled. “We’d feed the children. To me, that was a pretty sad sight.”

After the war, Buckles, who was born Feb. 1, 1901 on a farm near Bethemy, Mo., worked for steamship companies. He was in Manila on business when the Japanese invaded after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He was imprisoned for more than three years, losing more than 50 pounds, before he was freed by an American Airborne unit in February 1945.

1n the mid-1950s, Buckles retired from working for steamship companies and took up cattle ranching in West Virginia. He reportedly was still riding a tractor at 106. He is to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors.

As the Times put it, Buckles, who was only a corporal, “became something of a national treasure as the last link to the two million men who served in the American Expeditionary Forces in France” in what used to be called the Great War.

In like manner, he was the last link to my own father, a first sergeant, older than Buckles by five years. Dad, who was wounded in trench warfare, was awarded the Silver Star Medal for gallantry. When he came home from France, he tried law school, dropped out, and went into the flooring business as a contractor and a lumber salesman.



The one thing I remember was his saying: You didn’t think about flag and patriotism in combat. You worried only about yourself and your buddies.



At times, my father seemed to relive the trauma of the war. They used to say fellows like my father were suffering from shell-shock, or battle fatigue. Today, they might call it a post-traumatic stress disorder. The older he got, the more he looked back, though he was not truly old when he died at 62 of a heart attack on a business trip to Texas in 1958.



Had he lived until 2011, my old man would have been the last doughboy at 115.

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 Factory Fire that Changed America

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

A century ago, 146 people, almost all of them women, died in a fire in New York City. It is known to history as the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire.

The workers were trapped on the three top floors of the 10-story loft building close to Washington Square. Doors to the  stairwell were locked. There were no fire escapes. Some 100 were burned alive; the others jumped or fell to their deaths.

The conflagration was sparked by a cigarette and spread quickly.

In his fine 1989 book, “A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt,” Geoffrey C. Ward wrote that there was a trial but no one was found legally at fault. The building’s owners were permitted to get about $65,000 in insurance. “Twenty-three families of the dead sued and received a total of $1,725 — $75 per life lost.”

The horrible deaths led to demands for reform. In those days, it was not uncommon for people to work 12-hour days, six days a week. Nonetheless, it would take years before legislation was enacted to regulate working hours and conditions, abolish child labor, establish building codes, and enact laws providing for workers’ compensation.

The urban New York Democrats — in particular Al Smith and Robert Wagner — took the lead in pressing for labor legislation. Franklin Roosevelt, a wealthy young state senator from an upstate rural district, did little, if anything, to advance the reform bills. His metamorphosis from one who showed little interest in the problems of the working class to one of its champions would come later in his life after his battle with polio. John Gunther, the journalist and author, would one day say of Roosevelt: “He did more for the under possessed than any American who ever lived.”

The fire — it occurred on March 25, 1911, a Saturday — was one of those events by which the world keeps time. It influenced standards for the protection of public safety, health, the structural safety of buildings, and much else throughout the country. Two decades later, lessons learned from the Triangle Shirtwaist disaster would help shape Roosevelt’s New Deal.

In the days when Social Security was being designed, FDR insisted on the placing of a tax for unemployment and old-age benefits. Several years later, in 1941, an expert on these matters suggested to Roosevelt that it might have been a mistake to levy those taxes during the depression.

Roosevelt said, “I guess you’re right on the economics, but those taxes were never a problem of economics. They are politics all the way through. We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral and political right to collect their pensions and the unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my Social Security program…”

Maybe not. But, in our own time, Republicans, drunk with power, are resolved on cutting so-called entitlements, including Social Security, to the point of privatization.

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 .

Obama’s Tough Choices

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

President Obama’s budget plan is a big step back from the ambitious visions he once had for the country. He says his strategy is to meet the Republicans half-way. But he may have to think again. The last time I looked, the GOP was still shooting down anything he proposed. Their overarching goal is to defeat Obama in 2012. In that spirit, the Washington Post said, “His new budget plan was quickly dismissed by Republican leaders, but the document serves as a measure of his problems — revealing  limited ambitions and practical calculations.”

The president delivered no blueprint for the major issues that are inflating the deficit, like health care, foreign wars and taxes. These matters were put off, presumably, until the economy improves and cordiality returns to Washington.

Some items that were not put off are proposed cuts in clean water and clean air programs — and a nearly 50 percent reduction in a program that helps low-income families with their heating bills. The president says he can feel people’s pain but times are tough. What he didn’t say is that the rich still get their tax cuts. On the other hand, the Republicans want much deeper cuts.

Speaking of taxes, I happened  to catch David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author, on the Ed Schultz show on MSNBC the other night. I used to follow Johnston’s tax reporting when he worked for the New York Times. Nowadays, he teaches at Syracuse University School of law, and is a columnist at Tax Analyst’s Tax Notes. Johnston says bipartisanship is not dead:

“On Capitol Hill, the Democrats and Republicans may no longer play cards and drink together, but that does not seem to stop them from working together to shift tax burdens down the income ladder even when it violated their promises on the campaign trail.”

To hear Johnston tell it, the Obama White House and the GOP are “united” on at least one issue — providing ever-increasing benefits through the tax system to some while “stiffing the working poor.”

A major point in Johnston’s study is that although “the tax compromise passed in December has been hailed everywhere as a payroll tax cut combined with an extension of the Bush tax cuts” it raised taxes on a third of Americans.

He adds: “The killing of Obama’s Making Work Pay tax credit, which the White House called the biggest middle-income tax cut ever, and the replacement of it with the Republicans’ payroll tax cut raised taxes on single workers whose wages came to $20,000 or less, and married couples with less than $40,000 in wages. That’s 51 million taxpayers, the Tax Policy Center estimated.”

Can that be right?

I am not and have never been a tax reporter and can’t vouch for what David Cay Johnston is asserting. But I know from reading his work in the past that he is worth listening to.

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 .

Obama’s ‘Sputnik’ Moment

By Mel Lavine

Special to the Times

I have to say, President Obama reminds me of a smart, young boss I once worked for in network news. We’ll call him Joe. Joe was young for the job and the executive producer he replaced was an old pro. The old pro went after stories because they were (a) interesting, (b) they had something important to say, and (c) they sometimes gave notice of what was in the wind.

However, the old pro was fired because a competing broadcast on another network was making headway. Joe came in and the difference between him and the old pro was so plain. Joe studied market reports and based the pieces we did on what the market research told him people wanted to hear — not on the merits of a story or things the public needed to know. Over time, with new faces on the air, the show’s ratings improved.

I liked Joe; we got on, but the shows as they were produced gave me an uneasy feeling. I feel something like that with Obama. I like Obama and want him to succeed. But this bipartisanship business smacks of too many hours spent reading surveys and polls and in-depth analyses.

In his State of the Union Address last month, the president called for another “sputnik” moment or wakeup call for America in its rivalry with China and India for high-tech supremacy. The Soviet’s Sputnik, launched in 1957, was the world’s first space satellite, and set off a costly race for supremacy in science between Soviet Russia and the U.S. for many years.

Absent in the State of the Union was any mention of climate change. It was one of Obama’s most urgent issues when he was in the senate, when he ran for president, when he was elected, when he delivered his first speech to Congress in February of 2009, when he accepted the Nobel Prize in October in the same year, and when he delivered  his first State of the Union in January 2010.

As Hendrik Hertzberg cited in the New Yorker, among other words that did not show up in this year’s speech, were “unemployment,” “inequality,” “gun,” “environment,” “Israel,” “Palestine,” and “Guantanamo.”

This week, the president went out of his way to make peace with business leaders at the Chamber of Commerce. In effect, he proposed a deal: He would get rid of unnecessary regulations and simplify the tax code if they would  help the economy by spending some of the two trillion on which they’re sitting to create jobs. In return, Obama promised to get rid of unnecessary regulations and simplify the tax code.

One executive called Obama’s suggestion too simple. “I think it’s a little outside the bounds to suggest that if we hire people we don’t need, there will be more demand,” he said.

In fact, American corporations may no longer need the government. It’s estimated as much as half their income comes from overseas. Big business is also making an increasing number of products abroad.

Obama is not naive. With 2012 in mind, my guess is he’s polishing a moderate, middle-of-the-road image, what polls say is his best bet for re-election. But is this good for the country? I raise the question because it reminded me of Joe, the bright young man I once worked for. Under him, we told people what they wanted to hear and the ratings rose. But it was at the expense of what they needed to know.

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 .