Dinner on Capitol Hill

So tonight I had a wonderful wiener schnitzel for dinner at the Cafe Berlin, a terrific German restaurant on Capitol Hill in Washinton, D.C., while trading gossip with a friend about the latest back-room maneuverings over the Farm Bill while sipping a very dry riesling from Alsace. Talk has it that the Farm Bill, a fascinatingly-complex legislative behemoth spending billions of dollars over ten years that has been stuck for months in House-Senate negotiations, is now likely to pass some time in March.

I just thought you might like to know. All the best. --KenA

My secret views about the Presidential campaign

So it came as quite a shock to me when I learned recently that there is a small group of people in this world who actually read this Blog.   Some even print off copies of my postings and pass them around. Please understand, I welcome you. But it did strike me as alarming. If people are reading what I write, then I actually need to be coherent and smart, and have something useful to say, like: Be good. Don't do evil. Eat fiber.  Call your mother. So on.

So I've divided that, as a special treat for those intrepid few eyeballs that actually venture into this rarified cranny of the Web, today I will begin to reveal my secret, private thoughts about the current 2008 Presidential election campaign. Up till now, I've kept them secret. But inquiring minds want to know. And the demand has reached a crescendo, impossible to ignore.

So here goes:

First, I reject the view that George W. Bush is the single worst president in American history. It's not that he hasn't tried.  The problem for Bush is the competition. James Buchanan (1857-1861) and Andrew Johnson (1865-1869) were both so abysmal, so incompetent, so malicious, that even a president as bad as Bush falls short. With Buchanan, his mis-management of the 1860 secession crisis set the stage for oceans of blood to be in Civil War.  With Andrew Johnson, his naked racism undermined any chance for positive post-War reconstruction and improving the lot of freed African-American slaves for the next hundred years. It's taken until Barack Obama (but more on that later...).

So I nominate George W. Bush as no better than third worst.  He has fewer redeeming virtures than Richard M. Nixon, a mean streak never shared by Warren G. Harding, and more destructive in his hard-headedness than Herbert Hoover.

Now, as for the active, serious candidates still standing for 2008: Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Barack O'Bama (I prefer the Irish spelling). I like them all in different ways, and think the country would be better of with any of them in the top job. Perhaps best would be something like this: Obama as president, Hillary as WH chief of staff, and McCain as Secretary of War. (I think he'd enjoy using the traditional name).

I can't imagine any of these three settling for Vice President.  Each probably would agree with John Nance Garner's description of the job as "not worth a bucket of warm piss." None, I think, would side with Chester Alan Arthur (VP to James A. Garfield who became president when Garfield was assassinated in 1881), who described the VP job truthfully as "a greater honor than I ever dreamed of attaining."

In my ideal outcome, there might even be roles for the also-rans: say, Mike Huckabee as ambassador to the Vatican, John Edwards as Solicitor General, Dennis Kucinich as commander of Area 51, and Ralph Nader as Miss Congeniality.


So with that, I'm ready to sit down with a glass of wine and watch the Oscars. I had my coffee this morning. Thanks for reading this, you few, you strong, you intrepid souls. I hope your eyeballs prosper.

Till then, all the best. --KenA

Awakening

Gasp!!! It's been five months now since I last posted anything on this Blog. Is that pathetic, or what? Well, if you thought I was gone, you were wrong. I have not dropped off the face of the earth. You are not rid of me. I have decided to come back.

The truth be know, I have largely shelved my writing-historian life the past five months and happily returned to my first profession, practicing law. Yes, by day, I am a registered, card-carrying Washington lawyer-lobbyist. You can look it up. Here's a link to my latest public report at OpenSecrets.Org: http://www.opensecrets.org/lobbyists/lobbyist.asp?txtname=Ackerman%2C+Kenneth&year=a&txttype=l ) The work has been interesting and productive and -- no apologies here -- it's been lucrative too. Writers have to eat and pay bills, and I like to eat well. And a few months of hourly billings certainly helps.

But so much water has run under the bridge these past few months: Hillary, Obama, McCain, easily the most exciting Presidential sweepstakes in memory, not to mention the ongoing drama between George Bush's last gasp White House and Nancy Pelosi's stumbling Congress, and now the economy bumbling over, of all things, subprime mortgages. And that's not even counting the New York Giants. What woeful, thrilling times we live in. How can a historian be silent?

Yet here I am, sitting silently all these months, a mere spectator. No, I haven't given up being a fervid political junkie. I continue to read my three newspapers each day (the Washington Post, NY Times, and Roll Call). I listen to POTUS 08 on XM radio, check the DrudgeReport and other internet sites, and tune in pundits for hours on end. No excuses. I like it, and wouldn't have it any other way. But every time I sit down to try and write a Blog post or an article, about politics, history, or anything else, I get distracted. Words dry up. I find other things needing attention. Writer's block? Perhaps. But these blocks don't come out of thin air.

Since my last book was published in May 2007 (Young J. Edgar: Hoover the Red Scare, and the Assault on Civil Liberties, 1919-1920), I admit that I've researched at least half a dozen good ideas for next topics, including possible narratives about figures as diverse as Emma Goldman, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, American socialist founder Eugene V. Debs, long-time autocratic House Speaker Joe Cannon, feminist pioneer Victoria Woodhull, John Adams and the Boston Tea Party, and even the adventures of a once-famous British ocean deep-sea diver from the 1880s named Alexander Lambert. All these ideas have great promise, real keepers. But here too, the writers block sets in. I find problem at every turn, and no path out of the forest.

So I've made a decision. To start writing again, I need to write. And be published. That's the only way to beat writers block. And in this modern world of cyberspace, the way you do it is through a Blog. So here I am Blogging -- and in this initial effort, I am Blogging in the worst stereotypical way: with a self-absorbed, nascissistic, whiney, inconclusive essay about nothing but myself. But I guess that's how you start. It doesn't become literature overnight.

So expect to see me posting more often on this space. What I'll write about, what shape it will take, ony time will tell. But plan to spent time having Coffee with Ken. I am going into writer's training. Any encouragement would be appreciated.

So that's it from the home front. Hope you'll put up with me in the meantime.

Thanks, and all the best. --KenA