The Big Thaw

Spring is only a few weeks away. The ice, still solid enough on northern lakes to support heavy trucks, is imperceptibly weakening as the sun angle increases a few degrees each day. When the ice finally starts to break up and water reappears, it will seem as if it happened all of a sudden, but the process will have started much earlier – we just couldn’t detect the evidence of it.

It’s my feeling that thaws are breaking out all over. Take immigration reform – an insoluble problem for decades. But Romney lost the election, many say, because of the Latino vote. It wasn’t some wild political swing. For decades, Latinos have been having more children than folks of other ethnicities – there are simply more of them, but the evidence is only now making headlines. True, not all Latinos are Democrats, but a lot voted that way. So now even Republicans are talking about immigration reform. Positions frozen for decades are unfreezing.

The same is happening with gun control, although it took a terrible tragedy to spur the breakup of long-frozen positions on that score. The NRA is no longer a solid block of immovable ice, or at least the block is smaller than it once was. Women will be officially allowed combat roles in the military – unthinkable until this month. Will widely accepted gay marriage and the legalization of marijuana be next? I wish the big thaw would extend to tax reform, but that ice is pretty thick yet.

Then there’s the economy. The struggling stock market has actually been improving for years, but it seems like it happened just last week, when the Dow closed above 14,000 for the first time in recent memory. Home sales are increasing; money is flowing again.

Even internationally, I hear ice cracking. Iran has agreed to return to the talks on its nuclear program. Is this simply deception, or is a hard frozen position melting? Even some members of the Syrian opposition are no longer ruling out talks with the brutal Assad regime.

Is common sense actually starting to bloom? I don’t know about you, but I’m convinced something is going on. Spring is a hard season not to like.

In Politics, It's Back to Business As Usual

So much for parties’ parties. The big political conventions are history, and there’s probably no question that for sheer presentation, the Democratic show eclipsed the Republican version. Of course, the Dems had a bigger hall, there was no hurricane to compete with, and they got to capitalize on the GOP’s mistakes. And then, there was Clint Eastwood, but that’s another story.

A friend rightly pointed out that the conventions are nothing but expensive infomercials, and I’d agree with that. Still, they do give us a view of the major-party candidates. While some people dismiss speechifying as simple fluff, the fact is that one of the skills a president needs is the ability to connect and inspire, especially at times when the country needs it -- even if the facts sometimes interfere with a good speech.

Now what? Well, for the moment at least, it’s (sadly) back to hit pieces and attack ads, which will likely increase in frequency and intensity. The conventional wisdom is that these “work,” although the electorate may be a little smarter than the campaign professionals think. Please forgive me if I seek refuge in NPR and PBS for a couple of months.

What we can look forward to are the upcoming debates. Here again, many may dismiss these as a simple display of particular skills, and it could be argued that the candidate who is the most effective debater isn’t automatically the most effective leader.

Even so, every view of the candidates in action, at conventions, in debates, one-on-one interviews by both serious journalists and late-night talk-show hosts, and even in dealing with the negative ads, furnish pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that have the potential to produce workable pictures of the people most of us will be voting for.

No doubt, many of us feel that our political system, in terms of the two major-party candidates, has left us with nothing but a bad choice. But at least we have one, and it would seem that the choice is pretty clear.

All that said, though, please forgive me when I say that I wish the calendar today read November 7 instead of September 7.