Susan's Musings

Mitt's Money Obstacle

Too much money. Could that be the core reason for Mitt Romney’s lack of success during this primary season? As strange as it sounds, I am becoming convinced that his ability to draw on his own millions may have hindered his campaign. While most of us chuckle at the idea of too much money causing problems and would welcome the opportunity to test the thesis, consider these cases.

A number of years ago I read a charming wedding announcement. The bride and groom met through an online dating program. As they connected and began to explore a relationship the young man found his match to be tremendously reticent about her employment. She wouldn’t even reveal her last name! He finally concluded that she worked for an intelligence agency and only hoped it was the CIA rather than the KGB. Once she trusted him, the truth came out. She was an heiress working for the family company and  worried that the wrong sort of man would be attracted by her bank account rather than by her essence.

I know another gentleman in his mid-thirties who has been singularly unsuccessful in establishing a career. The problem? As the recipient of an annual endowment from a trust set up by his late grandparents, he isn’t hungry enough to put in the necessary “grunt hours” needed to master skills. The idea of working diligently for significantly less than he gets for just breathing has become an obstacle in his life.  He’s a talented guy, but life has come just a little too easy for him.

Mitt Romney earned his money honestly and can use it as he wishes. But perhaps he should have initially assigned a certain amount of seed money to his campaign. Thereafter, he could have used his own money only to the extent it matched the donations he received. I think the benefits would have been two-fold. Firstly, market forces would have helped his campaign focus more on the values and arguments needed to win a presidential battle rather than on attacking his opponents. By making his supporters vital partners in his campaign he could have used his many aptitudes and abilities to build a more appealing platform.  Secondly, he would have more of an appreciation for the voters. When you depend upon an avalanche of $35 donations, you recognize that each person is important. In a country that believes in ‘one man, one vote’ that is a valuable lesson. Furthermore, anytime someone reaches into their pocket and gives you money that person has invested in you. That builds the grass roots troops necessary to beat President Obama.

Mitt Romney will not be able to outspend Barack Obama through his personal resources. Neither will he be able to run a negative campaign without alienating the people whose support he needs. He has wasted much of this lengthy and rather miserable primary season by relying on money rather than on developing a strong platform. Whether he wins or loses the nomination, his wealth may well have been one of his biggest drawbacks.

Ideology Interrupts the Story

Certain rules of writing are easier to memorize than to obey. One of the most basic ones is the importance of staying on topic. As a writer, it is tremendously difficult to remove a phrase you love or edit out a point about which you are passionate. When the words are completely extraneous, adding nothing to the story you are telling or the point you are making, their inclusion might say more about the author than about the topic.

Maureen Dowd’s recent NY Times column on actress turned nun, Dolores Hart, is a case in point. Despite achieving promising success as a young and attractive actress, Ms. Hart left Hollywood, choosing instead to take the vows of a Benedictine nun.  She is newsworthy right now because a documentary of her life has been nominated for an Oscar. The contrast between the beautiful 24 year old who appeared with Elvis Presley and the elderly 73 year old mother prioress planning to attend the coming award ceremony certainly makes for absorbing reading.

The narrative, however, provides less human intrigue to me than the completely gratuitous paragraph which Maureen Dowd included in her article on the subject. I’m going to present a few quotes and ideas from the column. Let’s see if you can spot the ones that have nothing at all to do with Dolores Hart.

1)    In 1958, a friend suggested to the actress that she spend a few quiet days at the Abbey.

2)    The church cares more about banning contraception than about investigating child abuse.

3)    The church has an “antediluvian male hierarchy”

4)    The actress was engaged to be married when she realized she wanted to be a nun.

5)    The tabloids couldn’t believe that there wasn’t a hidden reason for Dolores Hart’s choice and reported a (false) rumor that she was pregnant.

It wasn’t terribly hard to choose numbers 2 and 3, was it? With this column Maureen Dowd intended to reveal something about Dolores Hart’s history and religious epiphany, but she ended up revealing much more about herself.

Santorum's Spotlight

 

And my nominee is….the first candidate who reads, absorbs and acts upon the excellent advice to candidates given over the past few months by conservative writers. While I am in the doldrums over the actual candidates, I have been inspired by so many writers. Whether it is Wall Street Journal editorials, bloggers or columnists I find myself shouting “yes” reading article after article while I groan listening to the candidates themselves.

Like so many others, I have spent much of this election primary cycle trying desperately to give the benefit of the doubt to Republican candidates. Perhaps candidate A has matured and developed his thinking; maybe candidate B has learned from his mistakes; is it possible that candidate C who was virtually unknown eight months ago can articulate what I believe? Unfortunately, disappointment follows on the heel of disappointment.

It is obviously easier to be a writer than a candidate. Seeing what is wrong is easier than rectifying it. Writing, which allows you to cogitate, revise, cogitate and revise is ten-fold easier than giving even a prepared speech, a thousand-fold easier than answering hostile questions and a million-fold easier than having every word you have ever uttered presented as front page news.  But even so, how can the candidates themselves, along with their managers and advisors, continually ignore a cascade of sage advice, displaying tin ears more frequently than wisdom?

A few weeks ago, I wrote at my dismay about Rick Santorum’s policy proposals. When I read about his ideas in the paper, I was tremendously upset. He was doling out teaspoons of water (and, in my opinion, murky water) to a parched nation; thinking on a small, outdated scale while huge problems needing bold solutions beset us.   I was distressed because there is so much about Rick Santorum which I admire.  I believe him to be a good man; what we need right now is greatness. Frequently, a position of responsibility seasons and matures an individual. We say that someone is “growing in office.” Right now, winning the nomination and getting into office demands that growth take place during the campaign. 

What would that specifically mean for Rick Santorum? It means holding tight to his core principles but also expanding them to encompass areas which aren’t his natural comfort zone. It means building a team which is not composed of ‘yes’ men and women, but which constantly challenges him to increase his areas of knowledge and improve his communication skills so that even those who disagree with him respect his arguments.  It means completely rejecting the Democratic strategy of pandering to specific interest groups, be they geographic, economic, racial, or otherwise and instead presenting a vision of an America which has potential to benefit all. It means retaining good character in a sordid nominating process.

I have read dozens of articles pleading with each of the Republican candidates to respond to the conservative base’s desire for principled, eloquent leadership in the economic, domestic and foreign arenas. Ignored at first, Rick Santorum has exhibited admirable persistence and temerity. There is no time to slowly ramp up to greatness. Citizens of a number of states have granted him the opportunity to be heard. Can he inspire confidence and be worthy of the approval of millions more? The window for him to achieve that is narrow; if he has it in him, the time is now.

What's Right with the Teenage Mind and Wrong with Society

Thinking “I told you so” is gratifying. Saying it might be crass, but thinking it  feels pretty good. Reading a Wall Street Journal article entitled, What’s Wrong with the Teenage Mind? I definitely underwent an “I told you so” moment.  My husband and I tried as best we could to structure our children’s upbringing according to 3,000 year old Torah principles rather than to the latest issue of Psychology Today. After all, when the newest fad passes you don’t get a chance to press “rewind”. For instance, if you teach your children to call you by your first name when the currently reigning psychologist explains how that will foster closeness, you will struggle to regain lost authority five years later when the most recently crowned psychologist rejects that reasoning. 

One commonly accepted view that my husband and I disregarded was a prevalent concept of “adolescence.” We did not accept it as an inevitable stage during which our teenagers would automatically behave recklessly because their prefrontal cortex wouldn’t fully develop until a few years later.  We certainly expected their judgment to improve as they matured, but we were never tempted to excuse destructive, impulsive behavior by blaming it on biology. We anticipated their making proper choices and overwhelmingly, they delivered.

The author of the WSJ article cites the latest studies showing that real life experiences drive the maturation of the impulse controlling parts of the brain. She mentions how cultural psychologist Barbara Rogoff studied Guatemalan Indians and found that their children could handle machetes quite competently. Yet western teenagers basically sit in classrooms, an activity which often starts when they are toddlers and continues for years on end. They may very well be acquiring information; they are not acquiring wisdom. Wisdom means understanding how the world really works. It comes from interacting with people and things, slowly developing a variety of skills. This is best achieved with a mentor who gradually accords his or her disciple greater independence. Information has potential value, but activating its potential means applying, practicing, testing, reassessing and utilizing the raw data.

As our children grew, we helped them develop skills. At tender years they worked in the kitchen, using the stove and sharp knives at ages which would have made Child Protective Services uneasy.  They learned to read charts and check the gauges in a boat’s engine room, to care for infants and toddlers, to do their own laundry and to earn money in ways which probably didn’t meet child labor laws. In varying degrees they learned to sew and work with wood and how to use public transportation and navigate bureaucracies. They studied as well, but book learning and safe, cocooned adult-directed activities didn’t consume their entire time. As they proved themselves capable of shouldering responsibility we gave them more freedom, and for the most part their teenage years were a delight.

While discussing the later arrival of impulse-control in today's times, the author of the above article also says, “…for reasons that are somewhat mysterious, puberty is now kicking in at an earlier and earlier age.“ For those of you who don’t have time to wait for the next psychological revelation to explain the mysterious reasons for the earlier onset of puberty, let me suggest an important component.  I believe that just as our actions influence our brain development in the prefrontal cortex, they also influence our hormones.

As a society we now give our children less and less freedom to roam and ramble and to push their physical limits. We provide them with an increasing number of electronic gadgets keeping them entertained and isolated in the home rather than playing in the streets. We organize their sports, arts and learning rather than allowing them independence. We do this (in my opinion usually to a much greater degree than is necessary) in the name of protecting them from the dangers which lurk outside. But at the same time we expose them to levels of sexuality which would have ranked as pornography in earlier times. We dress five year old girls like tramps and think it’s cute when little boys learn to parrot lewd expressions. This past week I was in a hotel room and flipped through TV stations. Three minutes of a popular show aimed at pre-teenagers were so brazen that I couldn’t watch it.  We force our children to lose their innocence in sexual education classes and bombard them with too much information as mommy and daddy host a revolving door through which boyfriends and girlfriends pass. We force intimate, private actions onto a public stage and we push our children into front row seats.  Lacking a shared moral compass in our society we contribute to early puberty with premature and excessive exposure to sexuality.

There may be satisfaction in seeing the world come to accept something which I never doubted. But I would gladly give up that satisfaction and instead be part of a correct-thinking community. It is incredibly difficult to defy the downward gravity of a society bent on devolution. Those of us who believe in timeless truths rather than transitory trends have a hard path to hoe – preferably shoulder to shoulder with our children as we guide them along.