Garrett Epps declares the creation of the presidency to have been “The Founders’ Great Mistake.” You’d think the history of the last 85 years would have made that clear to everyone, but evidently it has not. Epps does not propose abolishing the presidency. Instead, he outlines a plan that would keep the office in existence, but make the president dependent on the support of a majority in Congress. In effect, Epps would replicate a parliamentary system. That would be, if anything, worse than what we have now. At least now the president and Congress can fight each other to a standstill. Under Epps’ system, there would never be an opposing force to block the worst ideas that came out of the leadership of the ruling party.
Mark Ambinder’s piece on the way the Obama campaign handled race as an issue contains an interesting line:
Even during the 2008 primaries, a discomfiting pattern had emerged: Barack Obama did his best overall in the states with the largest or the smallest percentages of African American voters—think of South Carolina, where blacks made up 55 percent of the Democratic-primary vote, and Vermont, where they made up less than 2 percent. Obama won in states where black Democrats had already attained a measure of political power, or where whites had never competed with blacks.
Ambinder seems close here to an idea that has been rattling around on the far right for some time. Some writers, such as Steve Sailer, have claimed that “white guilt” is in fact a sign of disengagement from African Americans. Whites who support policies that might put other whites at a disadvantage to African Americans do so in order to show their superiority over other whites. On this view, “white guilt” is not a sign of belief in the equality of African Americans. Quite the contrary, it rests on a belief that African Americans will never be able to compete at the highest levels of achievement. Those who declare themselves racked by white guilt do so in order to show that they themselves are able to do so, and look down on those whites who have to worry about African American competitors. I don’t know if I believe that idea, but I do think it deserves wider discussion than it has received. Certainly it shouldn’t be relegated to Sailer’s blog and similarly confined venues.
Mark Bowden profiles Bob Fishman, who directs CBS’ television broadcasts of NFL games. The sheer number of decisions Fishman must make in the course of a minute of airtime staggers the mind. Cognitive psychologists should study the guy.
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