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Tyranny Vanquished by Love

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As an advocate of the healing manifested in the world through divine love – that is to say, as an apologist – the most painful apology is that offered by those that justify violence in the defense of received truth.

In modern America, those justifications are flavored with desperation. For many years, Christian culture was synonymous with the dominant Caucasian culture. The twenty-first century promises an end to that dominance, but that eventuality was clearly forecast in the last century. The misguided hope that change and accommodation can be avoided breeds irrationality, manifested in the religious extremism that spawned death-threats against doctors that prescribe chemical abortions or that drives parents to resist education in evolutionary biology. Fundamentalism bred in the military, where “Warriors for Christ” sometimes coerce religious conduct in their subordinates, and issue death threats against leaders in organizations (such as the Military Religious Freedom Foundation) that oppose that unconstitutional practice. In each case, the instigators see the tenets of their faith as justifying imposition of their values upon others, and therefore implicitly justifying a broader defense of inherited social privilege.

In both Judaism and Islam, this tendency is heightened by the intervention of God in martial struggles against those seeking to subdue the faithful. It is only in Christianity that radical non-violence is upheld. That the bookends to Christianity both deny the divinity of Christ may be symptomatic of a pragmatism that makes violence inescapable.

In Islam and the Destiny of Man, Eaton explicitly upholds this principle. A Sunni scholar, his survey of Muslim history after the death of the prophet concludes with the observation that the practical realities of maintaining control of an Islamic culture meant at least paying lip-service to its theology, which was often solidified by investments in public works that facilitated its spread. Through that means, tyranny was turned to the service of faith. But it goes beyond that – Eaton makes a deep statement that truth cannot survive in the world unless evil is divided from it, and that division requires violence. Indeed, the hypocrites of the ruling class in the Umayyad and Abbassid dynasties were short-lived.

In discussion with my Shia colleague at work, I have been slowly establishing the validity of the contrasting proposition of Christian faith: Jesus demonstrated that the pragmatic truths of this world are dust in the hands of those that manipulate them. What is known to be “true” is far less meaningful than what is possible. While the common reaction is “good luck with that,” I keep on pointing out that far more power is available to us than is required to solve the problems we face. A billion times as much energy leaves the sun as reaches the earth. It is not allowed us for the same reason that parents don’t give matches to children – one selfish miss-step can destroy us all.

But, you see, it wasn’t a solar eclipse on Good Friday. It was the sun pouring its power through him.

I discovered Lauren Naigle through BJ out at The River Runs. The compositions on Lauren’s debut album don’t rival those found in the secular (and often profane) debuts of Ricky Lee Jones or Norah Jones, and subscribe to a simple lyrical formula. But they encapsulate the fundamental truths of Christian experience: it is the loving heart that bled for humanity that demonstrates the preconditions for true power. Surrender self-concern and trust that all those that you love ultimately will love you in return.

Lauren is young, and among her tracks are jingles that might be dismissed as overly exuberant. But she has not been without suffering, losing two years of high school to an auto-immune disorder and a beloved grandfather. In How Can It Be’s closing homage, she pleads for self-surrender:

There is victory in my Savior’s loss
In the crimson flowing from the Cross
Pour over me, pour over me. (Yes!)

Oh let this be where I die
My Lord with thee crucified.
Be lifted high, as my kingdoms fall
Once and for all, once and for all.

Oh Lord I lay it down.
Oh Lord I lay it down.
Help me to lay it down.
Oh Lord I lay it down.

Bad things happen to good people not because they are weak.

Evil walks in the world, and hungers for the power that originates from love, but love recoils from its grasp. In Richard Nixon, the great lesson of abused power was visible when he bade farewell to his staff, tears streaming down his face as he juxtaposed his experience of political life with the love he had received from his mother. That is another way of reading Lauren’s lyrics: “Be lifted high, as my kingdoms fall. Oh Lord I lay it down.”

There are those immune to these realizations – Beria, Stalin’s security chief, spat on the corpse just moments after his master’s death. But Stalin has already been forgotten by history, replaced by Vladimir Putin, a man who justifies his power by promising to allocate money for road repairs left undone by the local governments impoverished by the corruption he organizes.

Putin’s political aspirations were conceived when unrest in East Germany paralyzed the embassy staff. Stepping in with a firm will, he saw people galvanized to action. It is this strength of will that he relies upon, but the lesson that is demonstrated by history is that the will to power is no match for the discipline required of those that love unconditionally. Tyrants can concentrate spiritual power, but they cannot hold it in any confrontation with a wise and loving adversary. The tyrant simply serves as a dark well in which light shines more brilliantly into the spirits of the oppressed.

The mistake of religious fanaticism is to believe that the institutions of tyranny must be dismantled, for that strategy only justifies oppression. The truth found in Christianity is that we don’t need to destroy the institutions of tyranny. Instead, in service with he that died once and for all, we can dismantle the personalities of the tyrants.

Oh, Lauren, what an joy it is to celebrate your wise old soul!

The Pope on the Pill

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Pope Francis has published an encyclical on the family that clearly states that contraception is a mature and moral practice that ensures that children grow up in a loving environment. We’ll see how this interacts with the Supreme Court’s decision in a recently-heard case brought by Catholic nuns who insist that they shouldn’t be forced to offer contraception as part of their health care insurance. The nuns, who have children only under the most irregular circumstances, had argued that the First Amendment guarantee of religious freedom trumped the requirements of the Affordable Health Care Act, which requires in part that health care plans offer contraception.

Oh, Tay, Can You See?

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Microsoft put up a speech-bot name ‘Tay’ on Twitter last week, and it took less than twenty-four hours for it to become a sexist Nazi. While labelled as “artificial intelligence,” Tay did not actually understand what it was saying – it merely parroted the speech of other users. On the /4chan/pol feed, that includes a lot of dialog that most of us would consider inappropriate.

What distresses is that Microsoft hoped to have Tay demonstrate the conversational skills of a typical teenager. Well, maybe it did!

In a recent dialog on the “liar Clinton,” I probed for specific proof, and received back the standard Fox News sound bites. When I described the Congressional hearings on Bengazi, the accuser had the grace to be chastened. This is typical of so much of our political dialog: people parrot sayings without availing themselves of access to the official forums in which real information is exchanged. The goal is to categorize people as “us” or “other,” with the goal of justifying arrangements for the distribution of power that benefit the “us.”

Donald Trump is a master of this political practice. Apparently his campaign doesn’t do any polling. He simply puts up posts on Facebook, and works the lines that people like into his speeches.

So I worry: did Microsoft actually succeed in its demonstration? Most American teenagers don’t understand the realities of the Holocaust or the difficulties of living under a totalitarian regime. In that experiential vacuum, do they actually evolve dialog in the same way that Tay did – with the simple goal of “fitting in?”

Somewhat more frightening is that Donald Trump appears to employ algorithms not too different from Tay’s. For God’s sake, this man could be president of the most powerful country in the world! He’s got to have more going on upstairs than a speech bot!

Fortunately, many teenagers, when brought into dialog regarding offensive speech, actually appreciate receiving a grounding in fact. You’d hope that our politicians would feel the same.

Too Smart for Your Neighbor’s Good

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As a practicing software developer, I regret that I must own up to the role software has played in facilitating concentration of risk in our society. By “concentration of risk,” I mean that people (or classes of people) who suffer misfortune are often required to pay more for services, which increases their vulnerability.

Paradoxically, this situation arises due to the desire of those that have wealth to minimize risk and maximize return from passive investments such as lending and insurance. That supports a class of investment and financial advisers who seek to segregate populations into “high-risk” and “low-risk” communities. In the health care industry, that “high-risk” obviously includes someone with a pre-existing condition. “Low risk” would be someone that exercises regularly and moderately and does not smoke.

The advent of computerized information gathering and processing means that identifying and marketing to “low-risk” populations is possible today in ways that were not possible before. Now that might seem to be a good thing – we obviously want to reward responsible behavior such as moderate exercise, and discourage irresponsible behavior such as smoking. Charging people more money is one way of sending those signals.

The difficulty comes when behaviors previously thought to be acceptable are discovered through statistical analysis to be correlated with high cost. Smoking is the obvious example. Many doctors smoked prior to the publication of the cancer studies that resulted in the warning labels on cigarettes. It was a rational choice: smoking helped them to manage stress, and by restricting blood flow in the extremities, helped them to think more clearly.

Even more difficult is when we actually have no control over our risk. Let’s say that we learn that our genes themselves are risk indicators. What are we supposed to do about that? Go back and tell our parents not to have sex?

But this is why it’s called “insurance.” Life is full of circumstances beyond our control – just think of the victim disabled in a head-on collision with a drunk driver.

So far, though, we’ve been considering situations that involve meaningful learning. That’s a desireable application of statistical analysis. But that’s not the kind of analysis that created the two great financial disasters of the modern era: America’s grossly inefficient health care market and the mortgage industry meltdowns. Both of these were driven by risk analysis unrelated to personal conduct.

In the health insurance market, the problem began with the formation of companies that sought to isolate and insure only those that were healthy. They offered tempting premiums to those in traditional full-service health plans, which caused many of them to switch carriers. Unfortunately, this meant that the traditional plans were starved of the premiums that financed care for sick people. To stay in business, the traditional health plans raised premiums, which eventually began to force the sickest people (often disadvantaged as income earners) out of the plan.

Unable to afford insurance due to their pre-existing condition, the chronically ill either went without care or applied for coverage that did not include their preexisting condition. Discovering this trend, the low-cost insurers hired claims agents to vet insurance applications. Then the real catch-22 came in: when the insured became sick with another illness, they were denied coverage because they did not report their pre-existing condition. They paid for insurance, and were denied coverage. Eventually, the profitability of this practice became such that profit-conscious insurers would routinely deny coverage for expensive treatments, forcing patients into lengthy and obscure claims adjustment procedures that they lacked the understanding to navigate.

Let’s be certain that we understand clearly: people who enrolled when not sick and led normal lives became ill, and were denied the benefits of their life-long participation in health insurance because people not so misfortunate were poached away by insurers that offered them lower premiums. Some among those insurers chose to maximize their profits by using complex statements of coverage and simple intimidation to avoid paying expensive claims. In conclusion: the application of sophisticated data analysis techniques distorted the health care coverage system by increasing the number of insurers, and therefore the total cost of its administration, while isolating the sick and poor from health care.

In the mortgage industry, the process was more subtle, and more directly reflected the divorce between financial management and service provision. Historically, banks made money on mortgage interest payments. They provided the money for the home purchase, and carried the risk of default. As the housing market became less and less stable, the large money market banks sought methods to distribute this risk. Sensible enough. They created “mortgage-backed securities”: essentially stocks that pooled mortgages, allowing investors to buy mortgages in bulk without having to administer loans. Particularly for overseas investors, American interest rates represented an attractive premium over those available in their relatively impoverished markets.

There were two twists in the implementation of the program. I’ll focus on the first, because mortgage security risk pools is too arcane for casual discussion.

First, how were banks to make money for placing the loans? They were giving up the long-term revenue of interest payments. There was another source of profit in the mortgage process, however: the closing costs paid on the transaction itself. This was baked into the system however, and so not particularly easy to increase.

So another strategy was chosen: the adjustable-rate mortgage, or ARM. This was structured to enable underqualified buyers to get into a home with low fixed interest rates, with a switch to much higher floating rates after five years. While many home buyers may have thought that improved earnings would allow them to manage the higher payments at five years, downward pressure on wages actually meant that most of them were forced to refinance their mortgage at five years with another ARM. Now this might seem unfair to the mortgage holder, who was losing out on the high interests rates expected after five years. But the holder didn’t have access to the customer – the banks did. And the banks profited because the refinancing allowed them to collect closing costs again.

Eventually, this system went completely out of control. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial meltdown, it was discovered that many of the largest and most aggressive mortgage aggregators (such as CountryWide) routinely falsified loan applications to make the loans appear less risky than they were. Effectively, they were defrauding those buying the loans as securities, and those (such as Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae) that insured them.

Of course, when the system collapsed, it was the homeowners that were hurt the most. A mortgage default is an incredibly abusive process: the homeowner loses all of their equity. Let’s be specific: if you’ve paid off 80% of your mortgage and fall behind on payments on the remainder, ownership of the property is returned to the mortgage holder in full.

For this reason, many states have laws that protect homeowners in the event of default on their primary mortgage. Home-equity loans, however, violate that protection, as does (you guessed it) refinancing.

How did information technology contribute to this mess? By enabling the creation and marketing of mortgage-backed securities.

But my point here is that in both situations, it was the desire to avoid risk and maximize profit that created dysfunctional systems focused solely on profit creation to the detriment of those actually paying for the service – either the patient or the home owner. These are average members of the public who of necessity must trust the expertise of those providing the service, just as the insurance agent or realtor must trust the plumber that comes to unclog their toilet.

Prior to the modern era, one of the fastest ways to wealth was to sell “death insurance” to the poor. This was often a fraud, with the “insurer” skipping town when people began to die. To limit this public nuisance, regulations were established. In the ’90s, however, information technology drove evolution in these industries that did a complete end-run around the regulatory restrictions. It behooves the public to be conscious of that, and to hold their representatives in government responsible for any failure to anticipate and moderate the excesses the ensued.

Future Challenge

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During conversations at work this week, I was reminded of how fortunate we are in America. A Veitnamese engineer observed that he was astonished by the amount of emotional energy we build in our presidential campaigns, when in fact nothing changes when an new occupant sits in the Oval Office. In Vietnam, people would take their money and bury it out in a field, because they didn’t know whether they would be forced from their homes after an election. And those serving in high office might find themselves jailed or executed.

This sentiment was echoed by our Hungarian visitor, the majority owner who complained that US policy had transformed Syrian, Egypt and Libya from stable dictatorships into violent anarchies. Of course, that’s not what happened – we simply chose not to throw our weight behond the dictators when their people rose against them. And the anarchy that resulted is symptomatic of nations whose institutions have been weakened by purges. Without any experienced leadership, those assuming power have to build civil society from ground zero against the resistance of those that benefited from the cronyism used by dictators to spread influence from government into the economic sector. The economic elite knows that dictatorship is essential to its privilege, and works hard to justify its restoration.

Among American youth, the evidence of recidivism in liberated lands must be demoralizing. They fought and died to create the opportunity for change in Afghanistan and Iraq, and now the societies tear themselves apart in ethnic conflict and class warfare. Any such frustration would only strengthen the political anomie that I hear expressed by young engineers, hair-cutters and baristas.

What saddens me about this is that the coming generation, while facing enormous burdens, also has awesomely powerful tools available to it. My youngest son complains that modern educational standards far surpass those required of my generation, but I remember in high school having to drive down to UCLA to get source materials for my AP History reports. When he was struggling last year with a paper covering the prophetic writings of Verne, Asimov and Clarke, I shared my perspective, and he came back thirty minutes later reporting that he had been able to find supporting references through the search engines.

In social action, Facebook and other engines (some devoted solely to social action) allow organization across geographic and cultural boundaries. They have their defects – internet trolls have mastered the subtle sociology of fomenting hostility. But researchers at MIT and elsewhere are using network theory and content analysis to identify such actors. I expect that within the next three years we’ll see a blooming of collaborative social communities on the internet.

As that process evolved, particularly among business leaders used through years of social media to transparency in their relationships, we’ll eventually reach a tipping point in social control. The relationships established and maintained online will evolve so rapidly that they’ll be beyond the control of bricks-and-mortar tyrannies.

What is critical is that the youth of the world recognize that they are still working within systems dominated by relationships established through face-to-face interactions. They need to temper their expectations for progress until they have managed to infiltrate those systems. That may seem counter-revolutionary, but it’s simply the way of the world. While the opportunities of the future seem obvious to our youth, the world is not structured at this time to transmit power through those channels. They need to pull up their bootstraps and play the role of midwife to the future that awaits their children.

Secret Freedom

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The NY Times published an opinion piece today on the confrontation between the US government and Apple over the forensic access to the encrypted data on Syed Farook’s cell phone – Farook being the perpetrator of the San Bernardino attacks in solidarity with ISIS.

The bug-a-boo raised by Apple is that if the accede to the US government’s request, a legal precedent will be established that will allow any government to demand that Apple assist in unlocking the contents of a cell phone. Included is that suggestion that any hack provided by Apple could make it into the wild, allowing anyone to unlock the data on any cell phone.

Let’s be specific about the details: the iPhone has a security feature that automatically erases all of your data if you fail to enter the encryption password correctly some number of times in a row. Now this is an interesting feature – Allah forbid that you should forget your password. It would seem that it would be in the interests of the owner to have some recovery mechanism. And after the incident, obviously the US government has legal possession of the phone. So why, as the owner, can’t it recover the data it owns?

The op-ed once again raises the specter of Edward Snowden, claiming that Snowden demonstrated that the government was spying on US citizens. As I recall, Snowden did nothing of the sort – what he showed is that the US government placed inadequate controls on access to surveillance systems by unauthorized subcontractors.

So I find it disingenuous that Apple refuses to assist the government with its investigation. Apple doesn’t have to release any code to the government – it could take the cell phone into its facilities, apply the patch, and provide the government with the data. Obviously, this is something that it can do currently for anyone, given sufficient inducement. Is the US government really out of line in its demands?

Being that Apple is big and bad enough to stand up to the US government, obviously it believes that it can stand up to the Chinese government. Or could it? Let’s say that China threatened to terminate production of iPhones in China if Apple didn’t break the encryption on a dissident’s cell phone. What would Apple do? Given that the principal driver for Apple’s stance is profit (which is why they outsourced to China in the first place), it might actually be that Apple would simply cave quietly behind the scenes.

Which is another open question: the big data services collect huge amounts of information on their customers. What do they do with it? Frustrating the government’s request to have access to data it owns is an amusing diversionary tactic. While Microsoft has large corporations looking over its shoulder,  nobody monitors Apple’s use of your data, nor Google’s use. Shouldn’t we be demanding some oversight?

I would be less skeptical of Apple’s motives if Cook was willing to recognize that there is a legitimate concern regarding information secrecy. I might argue that attempts to strengthen safeguards in the aftermath of the judge’s order is tantamount to aiding and abetting. If Apple clearly stated an ethical position, with guidelines regarding the conditions under which it will cooperate with governments to recover data, then I think that they would further the debate. As it is, I am afraid that he’s pandering to those that have good reasons for wanting to keep secrets – the criminal set.

American Myopia

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So I’m listening to Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow going on and on about the nominating process here in America, analyzing the psychology, political ideology, fund raising and electoral dynamics in New Hampshire. It was all very loud and breathless.

And then comes a notice for the Academy Award nomination for Winter on Fire, documenting the Ukrainian revolution, showing footage of citizens in confrontation with security services, and an under-age youth describing the dead falling around him.

What’s happening in American politics is exciting, but it’s not the only important thing going on in the world. Try not to feed the beast.

Conserving Liberty

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After my post Friday on Speaker Ryan, at Barnes & Noble that night I found myself disrupted in my technology research by a couple railing on about public sector unions. The particular focus of their wrath were police unions that negotiated full-pay retirement packages starting at fifty. As is well known in the West, some officers exercise that option and then take another assignment elsewhere, effectively double-dipping.

Now I agree that this seems unethical, and you’d think that some legislator would find a way to define “retirement” as excluding “leaving to take work elsewhere.” And the six-figure salaries being quoted ($200K) don’t sound like the compensation expected by a beat cop. Again, you’d think that redefinition of terms would be beneficial. There does come a day when a man can’t chase down an eighteen-year-old any longer, but that doesn’t apply to those pushing figures around on spread-sheets.

What was astonishing to me, though, was the framing of the discussion that brought such outrage to the conversation. During the 2008 down-turn, because of the pension obligations, Pheonix couldn’t afford to hire officers to replace those taking early retirement. This was set against the context of civilians that lost their homes in the mortgage melt-down.

For some reason, the couple ranting against the police union seemed to feel that was the union’s fault. Really? Not the financial wizards on Wall Street that stole another $500 billion from the public purse? What gall, to redirect anger against corporate financial fraud against the unions that seek only to secure the survival of the middle class that lost their homes!

This is what drives me crazy about conservative business owners. They rail about regulation as though it’s a confiscatory plot by the poor. Yes, we have the onerous terms of Sorvanes-Oxley that put a CEO at risk of jail if the corporate annual reports contains false information – but that was motivated by Enron’s manipulation or energy markets in California. Yes, we have the Affordable Care Act that requires all employers of more than fifty to provide health-care benefits, but that’s against the context of insurance company manipulations that denied coverage to many with pre-existing or chronic health conditions. And yes, we have rising taxes on fossil fuels, but that reflects a race against time against temperature rises that threaten to wipe out civilization as we know it, a race that has been road-blocked by oil companies (led by the Koch Brothers) propagating fraudulent science in an attempt to prevent governmental action to stimulate replacement of fossil fuels with renewable sources.

Let me focus the point: did nobody in the business world know about these transgressions, some simply moral, but in the last case rising to the level of crimes against humanity? Where were your voices speaking in outrage? Or were you all among those business leaders celebrating the “success” of practices that allowed executives to build huge estates and buy private jets with the gains from stock options that transferred hundreds of billions of dollars from share-holders funds into personal bank accounts?

Corporate America benefits every day from the investment made by middle-class America in roads, schools, emergency services and governmental process. They provide a steady steam of educated employees. They ensure the free movement of goods and safe working conditions. Access to those benefits is not a right, it is a privilege. Securing great wealth from that system comes therefore with a responsibility: to raise your voice when your peers abuse the public trust. Do so, and you’ll find that a lot of regulation would go away, because the cost of cleaning up from long-running abuse would be modest compared to the benefits that accrue from a freely running economy.

Be a Mom, Hillary

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“You know, Senator Sanders, my biggest concern for you is that if you win office, the same thing will happen to you that happened to President Obama. You make promises that you can’t keep to a young sector of the electorate. When President Obama did that, he stepped into the White House with every intention of delivering on his promises. He fought every day of his two terms to accomplish them, investing the energy of his Cabinet in determining what leeway there was to take executive action when the Congress refused to act on climate change and fair pay, and using his veto to frustrate Boehner and McConnell in their attempts to claw back our gains in health care, social justice and taxation.

“But despite all of his efforts – and I believe that history will show that Barack has been one of the great American presidents – when the chips were down in 2010, the people that elected him chose to stay home. Rather than doubling down for President Obama, they handed control of the House, Senate and many state legislatures to a party that has gerrymandered to protect their tenure, that has attacked public and private sector unions to drive down wages, that delayed action on global warming in service to private oil interests, and that held the entire government hostage to secure tax breaks for their wealthy taskmasters.

“You talk about moneyed interests and their power in politics, but the fact remains that President Obama was elected twice against those interests. The American system with its voter protection laws makes it extremely difficult for an informed and active electorate to be cheated of their rights. What my experience with President Obama has shown to me is that your youthful supporters need to get out and vote. They need to walk out of the factories and restaurants and schools on election day and support those that fight for them.

“Senator Sanders, we have fought for the people of America for decades. You describe that as a struggle against moneyed interests, while I highlight the goal of empowering each person. But we can’t do it alone. The American people need to support us in turn. The key to accomplishing our shared goals is not to whip them up in anger, because that hot emotion will just turn to frustration as the road gets steeper. The American people need to make a strong and reasoned commitment to stay the course. They need the wisdom and understanding to confront injustice themselves in city halls and state houses across the nation. But most of all, they need to make their voices heard on election day!”

Climbing the Mountain of Healing

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After eight years of fear-mongering and greed under the Bush Administration, on the day of Barack Obama’s inauguration, I stood in the conference room at work to watch the proceedings. Breathing more easily, I felt the will of Christ stretch itself across the nation to join with that of our new president.

I caught a clip of the Tea Party responder to this year’s State of the Union (a motivational speaker named Root) warming up the crowd at a Trump rally. While I can’t call it a message, the energetic peak of his oration was the statement “This is war!” That is one way to look at society, as a struggle to the death of factions in a world where there is just never enough. To survive, we have to find that mythical figure epitomized in our history by Washington, Lincoln or FDR: a great general and leader to whom we can entrust our lives.

The problem is that fear is a deeply ingrained physiological habit. It is a way of relating to the world that destroys reason. When the enemy is gone, the habit remains and turns inwards. For some, the escape is into substance abuse, but for others it finds release in seeking enemies among their fellows.

Again and again, our society has raised up representatives to heal those divides, and those representatives suffer terribly for our sins. Jackie Robinson and the Central High Nine were all abused for the privilege of entering the lily-white citadels of baseball and education, and understood that they could not respond in kind. I heard one of the Central High Nine speak on his experience, and while my first reaction was outrage, it was closely followed by awe at the strength and discipline he had demonstrated.

Barack Obama spoke about this problem in his confrontation with the bigots in the federal legislature who declared early on their intention to oppose him at every step. His response was of the type. It was captured for me in a photo: During one of the budget stand-offs with the House, he invited the Speaker to play golf. The event was memorialized on one of the greens with Obama crouched low over his ball, pointing to lay out the line to the hole while looking over his shoulder at Boehner for agreement.

I write this today because I find myself dumbfounded by the political analysis of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Obviously among the Republican front-runners we find those parroting the legacies of FDR (Trump) and Washington (Cruz). Their are bombastic and shallow, but raise fervor in their frightened partisans. There is much to be alarmed by in this phenomenon – it was the root of fascism in Europe. I consider it to be a cancer in the body politic.

On the Democratic side, we were promised a different dynamic, a dialog informed by reason. After the first Democratic debate, one headline characterized it as “The Adults Take the Stage.” But there are significant differences between the candidates, and these are not just in substance but in tone. The pundits have tried to characterize these differences, and now tend to settle “forward thinking” and “heart” on Sanders while saddling Clinton with “hanging on to the past” and “head.”

Sanders earns these designations for his fiery railing against the monied class. This appeals to the youth of our nation, those whose disdain for politics has allowed the establishment to secure its privilege by buying the House and Senate in off-term elections. Sanders promises a radical departure from the past, a storming of the castle to take back the wealth of the nation. He yells and gesticulates, demonstrating a strong emotional connection to his program that promises dedication to its achievement.

I have already expressed my discomfort with the similarities with the Republican front-runners.

I see Hillary struggling with her characterization. The body politic does seem to want passion, but when she projects it in her campaign stops, it rings false. That is picked on by the pundits, who have now taken to comparing her to Bush. But I believe that comparison reflects a deep and systemic misunderstanding of the disease facing our nation, and the fact that the temperament that makes Clinton so attractive to me at this time is simply incompatible with the politics of the males in the field.

Consider this: if you had liver cancer, would you feel encouraged by an oncologist who said “This is war! Your liver is evil! I’m going to take it out and stomp on it! And – oh yeah – thanks for putting my daughter through college.” Or would you like to be given sympathy and encouragement with specific options for treatment along with a description of side-effects and costs.

In other words, would you want a warrior or a healer?

In Hillary, I see the latter. Although I see it in Obama, it’s typically a feminine proclivity. Have some sympathy for her as she struggles against the burden of the pressures that have kept women from full and equal participation in our body politic.